I found a way to get Lazarus to open my project. If I open the project and nothing seems to happen…go back to open and open the .pas (in my case unit1.pas) file. It then opens the code and the form! WTH? Crazy!
Lazarus seems to have the potential to be incredibly useful to me. A former MS-Access programmer, who always wished he got the commercial Delphi product from Borland. MS-Access was very useful for my small projects. Combine Lazarus with SQLite3 and you have a great MS-Access replacement. I started to think my Lazarus projects were screwed up and I was almost ready to give up. This is a huge workaround. I think now I can continue to use it.