I just got a message from Michel Decima regarding an interesting problem. What happens when you have to use a library which maintains static or global variables that you don't have control over, and you need your singletons to have access to them? The answer is that you have to make sure that your singletons get destroyed before or as main ends, not after. To do so, you have one of three options: A) Use the dependency_lifetime and make sure not to keep any static or global pointers. B) Explicitly call destroy on each of your singletons before main exits. C) Explicitly destroy the secret singleton boost::singleton::detail::longevity_registry before main exits. I recommend option three, combined with some RAII. For example: struct CleanupSingletons ( ) { ~ CleanupSingletons ( ) { boost::singleton::detail::longevity_registry::pointer ( ).destroy ( ); } }; int main ( ) { CleanupSingletons cleanup; //... return 0; } I wonder if this functionality is useful enough that I should add a non-member function 'cleanup' directly in the singleton namespace which destroys the longevity_registry internally. Thoughts and opinions? -Jason