"There is not enough memory" Error when accessing IArea.LabelPoint

Question

I have an intermittent error that I'm having a terrible time tracking down so I thought I'd see if anyone has encountered something similar.

I am trying to access the label point of a polygon feature to put a text element there. Using ArcGIS 10.0 SP5, VB.net.

When I attempt to set the element's geometry to IArea.LabelPoint, I alternatively get "There is not enough memory," "Operation attempted on empty geometry," or "The operation could not be performed because the object was geometrically degenerate." So far this is only happening for one feature - other features in the same feature class work fine. The feature class is in an SDE so I can't do a Check Geometry.

The feature geometry is NOT empty (checked with IFeature.IsEmpty). I've checked the IPolygon4.IsEmpty property and it is False...until I try to do something with IArea, at which point sometimes changes to True (but not always)...regardless, when I check for empty geometry, the check passes fine, so doesn't stop the error. I've included the relevant bits of my code below - any ideas? At this point I don't even care about making the element for this particular feature, I'd be happy just to know what condition to check so that I don't get a fatal error when I try to access its LabelPoint.

(pFeature is an IFeature determined ahead of time)

Dim pTextElement As ESRI.ArcGIS.Carto.ITextElement
Dim pElement As ESRI.ArcGIS.Carto.IElement
Dim pPolygon As ESRI.ArcGIS.Geometry.IPolygon4
Dim pArea As ESRI.ArcGIS.Geometry.IArea
 If pFeature IsNot Nothing Then 
     If pFeature.Shape IsNot Nothing AndAlso Not pFeature.Shape.IsEmpty Then
          'get the geometry 
          pPolygon = pFeature.Shape
          'get the pointer to the IArea interface so we can get the labelpoint
          pArea = CType(pPolygon, ESRI.ArcGIS.Geometry.IArea)
          'new TextElement    
          pTextElement = New ESRI.ArcGIS.Carto.TextElement
          'Query Interface (QI) to an IElement pointer and set the geometry    
          pElement = pTextElement
          pElement.Geometry = pArea.LabelPoint
      End If
  End If

The error occurs on the pArea.LabelPoint, and debugging shows that the error is with the LabelPoint; pArea is not Nothing and has 0 area and one of the error messages listed earlier for Centroid and LabelPoint.

Edit: In case it helps, the various properties of the 3 main objects during debugging:

Edit #2: Because it didn't paste well in the comments, here was my workaround:

        Dim pSafeFeature As ESRI.ArcGIS.Geodatabase.IFeature
        Dim pParcelFC As ESRI.ArcGIS.Geodatabase.IFeatureClass
        If pFeature IsNot Nothing Then 
            pParcelFC = CType(pFeature.Class, ESRI.ArcGIS.Geodatabase.IFeatureClass)
            pSafeFeature = pParcelFC.GetFeature(pFeature.OID)
...

Proceeding with pSafeFeature instead of pFeature, everything works fine.

Answer 1

The code snippet you posted doesn't look bad. Perhaps grabbing the feature's .ShapeCopy instead would make a difference. And remove the implicit conversions:

Dim pPolygon As IPolygon4 = CType(pFeature.ShapeCopy, IPolygon4)
'get the pointer to the IArea interface so we can get the labelpoint
Dim pArea As IArea = CType(pPolygon, ESRI.ArcGIS.Geometry.IArea)
'new TextElement    
Dim pTextElement As ITextElement = New ESRI.ArcGIS.Carto.TextElementClass()
'Query Interface (QI) to an IElement pointer and set the geometry    
Dim pElement As IElement = CType(pTextElement, IElement)
pElement.Geometry = pArea.LabelPoint