I am serialising data structures that include objects of the form: std::vector<boost::shared_ptr<MyClass> > where MyClass contains simple times and further classes. This would not deserialise correctly in Boost 1.33.0 when in XML format, and I think there was discussion of there being a bug in deserialisation of vectors in that version of the serialization library. The bug persisted with the new version of Boost (not 1.33.1 that has just been released but a version from the CVS from a few days ago, which is probably close to or the same as 1.33.1 anyway). I tracked it down to the serialisation of an uninitialised boolean, to which Visual Studio .NET 7.1 had given the garbage value 205. The serialization library generates a stream error when this is read back into a boolean, naturally enough, because it is not a valid value for a boolean. My question is whether the serialization library should be made more robust to handle uninitialised variables. In the case of all other variables, of course, it is not easy or not possible to detect in a simple manner whether or not a variable is initialised: is that integer meant to have value 1.23456E+66 or is it just uninitialised? For booleans, though, a value of other than 0 or 1 means it has not been initialised, and perhaps this should throw an exception on writing to the archive rather than on reading from it. If handling uninitialised variables is not practical, then perhaps there could be a warning in the documentation that uninitialised booleans will cause stream errors on deserialisation. Paul