Rene, Here is my assessment of the status of the serialization library as it relates to the Metrowerks compiler. all versions of CodeWarrior C++ CW two-phase lookup threw me for a loop. It took me long time to really understand this. Now that I do, I'm strongly convinced that it's a really bad idea. I don't know if its true - but I think I heard that it was implemented in order to make template export work - which looks like another bad idea to me. Oh well. CWPro 9.2 - my home copy All tests using utf8-codecvt fail. This includes the test for utf8-codecvt itself. I have come to believe that its an error somewhere in the MSL 9.2 implementation of the standard library. CWPro 8.3 - your machine The tests which serialize arrays fail - I haven't looked at this too carefully. There might be an issue regarding references to arrays decaying into pointers. Borland also has this problem. test_diamond fails with this compiler - I haven't figured out why it fails only here. CWPro 8.3 and 9.2 Hashed set serialization fails to produce the correct result at runtime. I haven't looked real closely at this. Since its particular to this version of CWpro I suspect it might be a library problem. I don't know how many standard libraries include support for hashed sets so I don't know for a fact that other compilers are in fact testing this. serialization of polymorphic derived pointers. Forward declaration method. I had reorganize code in archive_pointer_oserialize etc and use MSVC specific key words (used by BOOST_FORCE_INCLUDE) in order to get certain things to instantiate static variables whose pre-runtime construction is necessary for this to function. This seems like a bad idea as CW supports lots of other platforms. I tried every alternative I could find but wasn't able to find a better one that worked. "Export" functionality suffers from a variation of the above which I have not been able to overcome. So tests which use export fail. I've spent even more time on this - without success. It seems to me that CW is too smart in eliminating code that it "knows" it won't need. Actually I'm not even sure it's a CW issue. Comeau has the same symptom. That would suggest it's another manifestation of the problem I'm having comprehending two-phase lookup. CW < 8 I believe that these versions will pass 100 % Robert Ramey