Ok, this is awesome. Last week I made changes in the Sandbox I had to revert and rework all over... Now the changes I made in both the pointer and the STL containers are clearly to ones I want to stick with. This brings up interesting concepts at the same time, such as: what should be the right parameter of allocator::deallocate() ? We can't use a raw pointer over there. We can see the non-official patch inside the bits folder and shifted_allocator.hpp which I think solves the problem correctly. Furthermore allocator::allocate() I beleive shouldn't return yet a smart pointer because it creates unnecessary temporaries which can be costly, depending on the smart pointer used. So the typedefs inside shifted_allocator are the way I think they should be understood by the containers... Thanks, -Phil