***resent with better subject line, apologies*** Hi, Consider class A, which contains an instance of class B, which in turn contains a weak reference to its parent A instance (note: pseudocode): class A; class B { weak_ptr<A> m_parent; } class A { shared_ptr<B> m_child; } I have a case where I am boost-serializing class A, and its load() method looks like so: template<class Archive> void A::load(Archive& ar, const unsigned int) { ar & m_child; m_child->m_parent = shared_from_this(); } Note that B does *not* serialize its m_parent member (this is by design). The problem I have is that the shared_from_this() call in A::load() fails, even though I am guaranteeing that A is serialized via a shared_ptr. Presumably boost.serialize is not placing the default-constructed instance of A into its containing shared_ptr<A>, before calling A::load(). My question is, is there any reason why boost.serialize couldn't deal with this special case, which would allow me to call shared_from_this() from load()? I don't have a workaround for this in my code, other than to resort to a raw ptr for B::m_parent. ps - I suppose you could argue that since you can't do this in A's constructor, you shouldn't be able to do it in its load() function either. However I do have a legitimate case where I need to do this... I can extrapolate on the whole situation if necessary, but I've left it out here in the interests of simplicity). Thanks boosters, Allan