cute example. This has nothing to do with dlls etc. The problem is actually quite simple: //The serialization itself oa.register_type(static_cast<BaseImplementation *>(tmp)); for(int i=0; i < 114; i++) { oa << tmp; tmp = tmp->getNext(); //oa << *tmp; } //oa << first; a) Your data structure is a loooong linked list of pointers. b) Serialization of the first pointer in the list is going to recursively serialize all the objects in the list. c) subsequent serialization of any previously serialized ones will be optimized away. If you want to do this in this way, The obvious way would be to make sure there's enough stack space. Remember that serialization is a recurrsive process. If you really need to serialize an arbitrarily long linked list, you'll have to think of another way. You might want to look at the implementation of serialization for std::list in the library which serializes the data but reconstructs the links on load (using push back) rather than serializating them. This was done not to avoid this problem but rather because it made use of the public interface of std::list. Robert Ramey P.S. Usage of export often cause "weird linking errors" do to the need to explicitly instantiate code not referred to by name. One then has to invest some effort in thinking about getting stuff serialized. This conflicts with the goal of the library to permit usage of serialization by those who have a lot of other stuff to do. RR.