Hi all, Sorry for my last question; it was posted hastily -- I subsequently found the Reference->Special Considerations->Optimizations section. Anyway, I have a new problem/question: It's somewhat similar to the "pointer_conflict" example: template<class T> void save(T t) { // create stream & output archive "oar" ar << t; // send with mpi/asio } template<class T> T load() { // retrieve string with mpi/asio T tmp; // create stream & input archive "iar" iar >> tmp; return tmp; } My problem (a few hours of debugging) was that on one end, I was passing in a pointer to an object: FooClass *foo; save(foo) and on the deserialization end, I was requesting an object: FooClass foo = load<FooClass>(); My mistake only showed up through the "array_size_too_short", since as part of the deserialization of FooClass, a fixed-length array was being deserialized, and I guess wonky parsing resulted in "count" being larger than "current_count" in iserializer.hpp. Is what I was doing dangerous, or should/can the boost::serialization library somehow catch that mistake (i.e. in the serialized string, cant it not detect that the object is a pointer to an object, even if it's unregistered)? My fix is to disallow the serialization of pointers on the forward side: if( boost::is_pointer<T> ) throw exception Thanks in advance for any thoughts you might share on the matter, Danny