Pattern groups

In the latest release, the restriction to have at least one pattern in a lexical pattern group was removed. However, when I clear all patterns programmatically, once I set isUpdating=false I get a strange error telling me that "language" is no longer set to an instance of an object. When I continue, my main form exits. I noticed in the last weeks that sometimes this happened before. Without apparent reason, the main app closed as if I chose "exit" (I even get asked whether I want to save child windows).

Is it possible that unhandled errors that take a syntaxeditor intrinsic object out of scope cause this behavior somehow?