I often have this crash on Windows client connected to Mele Stellarmate X.
Started to happen 2-3 months ago.
Usually, KStars crashes on the first try but after KStars restart Find Object works.

Strange, it consistently crashes for me, even after restarting Kstars or rebooting completely. I'd say it only works correctly about 5% of the time. But that's interesting that it's not localized to just my platform, then. I can try building it from source with -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug to see if that provides any more useful logging.

EDIT Building Kstars from Git seemed to resolve the issue: invent.kde.org/education/kstars#building. I am now on 3.6.8 beta, fwiw; unfortunately I'm not sure what the problem was in the first place.

This bug is reproduced in KStars 3.6.8 Stable Build: 2023-12-03T03:33:36Z on Windows.
I would like to see this fixed as it is very damaging when KStars crashes while preparing an observation.

I could not reproduce it on Windows. Please let us know the root cause if you find it.

Can you please tell me what source code and functions this issue might be related to, such as the code that is called after clicking the "Find Object" button in KStars?

I see that finddialog.cpp is the source code for Find Object.

When I run KStars on the debugger, this issue has never been reproduced and is difficult to investigate.
Usually such issues occur when there is a lack of initialization, but so far it doesn't look like that...