I am migrating a project from VS 2008 to Vs 2012 and in the process updated boost from 1.40 to 1.53. After days and weeks of project settings, editing third party source (not boost), playing with configurations, etc. I got a build! Unfortunately one of the unit tests has an unhandled exception. I debugged down into code that was foreign to me and see that someone was calling shutdown on a boost socket. Maybe they called it at the wrong time or already shut it down, or something. It isn't my code. However, this looks very suspicious to me: in boost's header basic_socket.hpp: void shutdown(shutdown_type what) { boost::system::error_code ec; this->get_service().shutdown(this->get_implementation(), what, ec); boost::asio::detail::throw_error(ec, "shutdown"); } I don't see how this would not throw? It looks like it _always_ throws? What's the deal here?