Further investigation revealed that this bug was only found in a single simulator (iPhone 14 Pro running 16.4) on a single laptop (MacBook Pro 16” 2021) running the release 13.4 Xcode. Since this was a standard baseline Sim for this release of Xcode, I could not figure out how to delete and replace it. The path of least investment and resistance was simply to delete Xcode and reload. my final assessment: a corrupted Sim module. Why it got corrupted is unknown.

The old VCs and IB Xibs are still in place. In transitioning to the new VC, I just pasted the new classes (all with different names) into the project. I rechecked all the outlets in the IB Connections pane and they all go to the correct place. I appreciate the thought though. LLDB does not catch the NSNull call so I can’t see where it’s coming from. might you have any other thoughts I can track down. This one stumps me.