Reproduced the crash with binary serialization. Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. #0 0x08082c1f in boost::archive::detail::basic_oarchive_impl::save_pointer () #1 0x08081f16 in boost::archive::detail::basic_oarchive::save_pointer () #2 0x08076ad8 in boost::archive::detail::save_pointer_type::polymorphic<RepeatBase>::save (ar=@0xbfd58428, t=@0x80bbd38) at /var/tmp/ma0/boost/boost_1_39_0/boost/archive/detail/oserializer.hpp:408 #3 0x08076b04 in boost::archive::detail::save_pointer_type::save<RepeatBase> (ar=@0xbfd58428, t=@0x80bbd38) at /var/tmp/ma0/boost/boost_1_39_0/boost/archive/detail/oserializer.hpp:428 #4 0x08076b6c in boost::archive::detail::save_pointer_type::invoke (ar=@0xbfd58428, t=0x80bbd38) at /var/tmp/ma0/boost/boost_1_39_0/boost/archive/detail/oserializer.hpp:457 #5 0x08076b98 in boost::archive::save (ar=@0xbfd58428, t=@0x80b9738) at /var/tmp/ma0/boost/boost_1_39_0/boost/archive/detail/oserializer.hpp:506 #6 0x08076bcc in boost::archive::detail::common_oarchiveboost::archive::binary_oarchive::save_override (this=0xbfd58428, t=@0x80b9738) at /var/tmp/ma0/boost/boost_1_39_0/boost/archive/detail/common_oarchive.hpp:64 #7 0x08076bfd in boost::archive::basic_binary_oarchiveboost::archive::binary_oarchive::save_override (this=0xbfd58428, .... In doing this I have noted. o creating small trivial cases seemed to work. o when I combined the test case files to a single file, it worked In trying to create the test case I figured out what caused the crash, Basically I had included text archive in all the compilation units but the binary archive _only_ in the file where I was outputting to the disk. When I included the binary archive in _all_ the compilation units that were being serialized, the test worked. I am not sure how common this case is, but gcc compiler/linker gave no warnings Maybe this need to be added as a gotcha in the documentation? Best regards, Ta, Avi