After battling for half a day with that subtle bug, I am posting the workaround and analysis here, in case other stumble on it.
The issue lies with the TWICImage class, which encapsulates Microsoft Windows Imaging Component, and can be triggered in multi-threaded usage scenarios, particularly in services.
SamplingProfiler v1.7.1 is now available, it fixes the crash in the paths dialog reported by Kazan in the forums.
Incidentally this was due to a very old Delphi 5 bit of code that somehow survived Delphi 2009 at the compilation level, but bombed at runtime… I dropped the code and made use of the already existing D2009 version, hence the smaller executable.
For further details on this version, see the v1.7.0 post.
Still hot out of the D2009 linker is v1.6.1 of SamplingProfiler.
This is essentially a bugfix release which should solve the Win2k compatibility issue.