Hello group! We are experiencing problems with boost::weak_ptr in a multi-threaded environment. It looks that the lock on the ref counting doesn't work well with weak_ptr in release build. configuration : Windows 2000 SP4 VC6 SP5 boost 1.33.1 In summary, it seems that add_ref_lock in sp_counted_base_w32.hpp has a bug in release. In disassemblies, we observe : 01 lea esi,[eax+4] 02 mov eax,dword ptr [esi] 03 test eax,eax 04 je TestWeakPtr+0E4h (00401244) 05 lea ecx,[eax+1] 06 mov edx,esi 07 lock cmpxchg dword ptr [edx],ecx 08 mov ecx,eax 09 cmp ecx,eax 10 je TestWeakPtr+7Dh (004011dd) At line 08, you'll see that we move eax into ecx and after (line 09) we compare ecx and eax that are obviously the same which will destruct prematurely our pointer. In attachement, I send a complete program reproducing the bug with VC6 in release. It is probably a bug in VC6. But is it caused by a bad use? is it simply a "bug" in boost 1.33.1? By the way, we can remove the "bug" by simply "patching" add_ref_lock implementation like this : bool add_ref_lock() // true on success { for( ;; ) { long tmp = static_cast< long const volatile& >( use_count_ ); if( tmp == 0 ) return false; long tmp2 = tmp + 1; if(InterlockedCompareExchange ( &use_count_, tmp2, tmp ) == tmp2 - 1) return true; } } Thank you for any suggestion! -- Alain Cormier alain.work@gmail.com