Here's a smaller repro w/o Boost + trim. So, this is a pure Microsoft issue, but may be of some interest to those who are disabling iterator debugging. #define _HAS_ITERATOR_DEBUGGING 0 #include <iostream> #include <string> int main(int argc, const char* argv[]) { // Now, show that certain constructors are broken. const char *pc = "Iterator debugging is broken"; string s(pc,pc + 9); string::iterator i = s.erase(s.begin(),s.begin() + 2); return 0; }