I've been reading through posts on here and in the docs but I think I may have missed something. Heres what I am trying to do: lets say I have a class Foo* and I'm trying to use it in a std::vector<shared_ptr<Foo> >. I can add them all day long and it works fine. The problem is that when I try to remove the shared_ptr from the vector. I expected it to delete the memory for the Foo* then delete itself (to completely free the memory that the shared_ptr used and the memory that the Foo was using. I think this is not happening though since the destructor is not being called when the elements are removed from the vector. Heres how I am currently inserting the shared_ptr's into the vector (yes I know this is the wrong way now that I've read a few of the posts here): typedef std::vector<boost::shared_ptr<Foo> > FooVector; FooVector Foobar; Foo* blah = new Foo(); boost::shared_ptr<Foo> * NewPointer = new boost::shared_ptr<Foo>(blah); Foobar.insert(*NewPointer); //Yes I know this looks horrible. And its probably wrong. When I call Foobar.erase() I thought that the shared_ptr would be removed and the memory freed (and Foo's destructor called). I tried it like this : FooVector::iterator CurrentFoo = Foobar.begin(); Foobar.erase(CurrentFoo); That did remove the shared_ptr but the Foo* did not seem to get deallocated, its destructor was never called. Some of the posts seem to indicate that this is a very bad way to let shared_ptr manager the memory, is there a better way to do what I want to do using shared_ptr or is shared_ptr the wrong tool to use?