Thank you to everyone who offered an idea or explanation. Thanks to all the input, I hunted down a part of code what was trying to set the large address aware option, but i'm guessing the syntax was wrong, yet the compiler did not complain about it. Once i took it out and replaced it with the following syntax

{$LARGEADDRESSAWARE ON}

Then things started working as expected. I thought all of this was supposed to be set to ON by default for a 64 bit build, and have no idea still about where it gets turned off. But nonetheless, mission accomplished.