Visual Studio 2005 C++ runtime new exception

Question

I have a VS 2005 C++ project with both Debug and Release builds. I've attempted the following 4 things:

1. Build a Debug executable through Visual Studio, and run it through Visual Studio.
2. Run the executable built in (1) externally via command line (Cygwin) after cd'ing to vstudio/debug.
3. Build a Release executable through Visual Studio, and run it through Visual Studio.
4. Run the executable built in (3) externally via command line (Cygwin) after cd'ing to vstudio/release.

The first 3 all succeed: the program runs to completion.

The fourth, however, crashes at runtime. Debugging shows that the culprit is the call to malloc() inside the operator new(). The relevant context looks something like this:

template<typename T> class Foo {
    ...
    static void bar() {
        ...
        T* ptr = new T();
        ...
    }
    ...
}

If anyone can think of any problem which would lead to the 3-out-of-4 symptoms I describe, it would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

You probably have a corrupt heap. This can be caused by a pointer writing outside the allocated memory.

A possible reason why this does not happen in debug mode is that you only overwrite debug information on the heap (which is not present in release mode).

I don't know you environment but you should probably get a tool like BoundsChecker to find the bug.

Answer 2

My first guess would be that cygwin has replacement DLL's for some of the Windows DLL's that your program was built to use.

A good way to test this would be to try running under the Windows command shell (cmd.exe) and see if you get the same error.