Occasionally in Delphi 5 the IDE will 'disappear'. This is to say you will launch Delphi, and most or all of your IDE will not be visible. Delphi is clearly running and working, as you can still use your hot keys and run and compile a program, you just can't see such useful items such as the object inspector or your component tool bar.

This is caused by Delphi saving bogus information in its desktop preference files, or '.dsk' files. Delphi saves information about your environment options and settings in these files. In order to see your IDE again, all you need to do is delete these offending files. This will in no way harm Delphi or your project, as Delphi will dynamically generate these files as it needs them. You will however lose any environment settings that you had set previously.