Tip for those insane persons who are trying to nurse vc6 along: Some kinds of SFINAE are possible. Forming a pointer to a reference, for example, will remove a function signature from the overload set. Here's something I did in Boost.Python just now. In this case it was only needed for VC6, but it should work for any SFINAE-ish compiler: template <class T> explicit object( T const& x # if BOOST_WORKAROUND(BOOST_MSVC, == 1200) // use some SFINAE to un-confuse MSVC about its // copy-initialization ambiguity claim. , typename mpl::if_<is_proxy<T>,int&,int>::type* = 0 # endif ) Ron Garcia reminded me that I had done this for the multi_array library a while ago, and I realized I had forgotten all about it. I thought y'all should know. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting http://www.boost-consulting.com