I have a text object defined like this:

TEXT* ss_ledgendDeathsText = {
strings = 1;
string("suicides");
font = ss_smallFont;
layer = 62;
}

At some point, I suddenly get a crash, and I found out that it is due to "ledgendDeathsText" being NULL.

I checked, I never remove ledgendDeathsText anywhere, so why could it be NULL?
Even if another function would remove the object, would not the pointer still point to the same location?
Also, the text is still displayed on screen... so I suspect only the pointer gets set to 0. But how can that be, when the only things I ever do with ledgendDeathsText are the following (these lines are all over my code, not in one place):

ss_players[playerIndex].deathsTxt.pos_x = ss_ledgendDeathsText.pos_x;
ss_ledgendDeathsText.pos_x = ss_ledgendScoreText.pos_x - 30 - str_width((ss_ledgendDeathsText.pstring)[0],ss_ledgendDeathsText.font);
ss_ledgendDeathsText.pos_y = ss_ledgendPlayerText.pos_y;
ss_ledgendKillsText.pos_x = ss_ledgendDeathsText.pos_x - 30 - str_width((ss_ledgendKillsText.pstring)[0],ss_ledgendKillsText.font);

set(ss_ledgendDeathsText,SHOW);
reset(ss_ledgendDeathsText,SHOW);

As you can see, I never reassign ss_ledgendDeahsText anywhere in the code, neither do I create any pointer pointing at the ss_ledgendDeahsText pointer, so how could it EVER be 0?!

are you using malloc or realloc on pointer you've defined before it?

I use sys_malloc and sys_free quite a few times in my code, yes. Why?

just thinking you could be clearing the data using either of those if you're clearing the incorrect size, are you able to remove those from the code without too much trouble and see if you still get the crash

well I only ever sys_free like this:
sys_free(point);

So it clears exactly the size of "point", right? No more, no less.
Also, the pointer is set to NULL, the object behind the pointer is not overwritten.

It looks like I've found a (disgusting) workaround.

Instead of keeping the one text object for the entire game, I now recreate it every time the function is called, and delete it at the end, so it doesn't matter if something happens with the pointer inbetween.

For now I can just hope it doesn't set some other random pointer to NULL...

Maybe you have an array you access with an invalid index? Did you define an array right before you defined your text? If so, it's most probably that array. Else, it could still be any other array.

Nope, before I define the text, another text is defined, which is always used in the same context (i.e. whenever text1 is visible, so is text2).

Also, wrong array indecies should result in a crash, not in setting a pointer to NULL...?

Well, for me wrong array indicies or invalid pointers != NULL often don't crash and instead change some random thing in Lite-C.
If you don't do anything to your pointer in the script, then is must be something where you accidentally access something random and that thing in this case always seems to be your text.

This does sound reasonable. Any hints on how to find such a thing?

If I start looking through all arrays in my script, I'll probably still be looking in a month...
I could add logging functions before all array accesses, to log the indices, but that sounds expensive...