Virtual methods chaos, how can I find what causes that?

Question

A colleague of mine had a problem with some C++ code today. He was debugging the weird behaviour of an object's virtual method. Whenever the method executed ( under debug, Visual Studio 2005 ), everything went wrong, and the debugger wouldn't step in that method, but in the object's destructor! Also, the virtual table of the object, only listed it's destructor, no other methods.

I haven't seen this behaviour before, and a runtime error was printed, saying something about the ESP register. I wish I could give you the right error message, but I don't remember it correctly now.

Anyway, have any of you guys ever encountered that? What could cause such behaviour? How would that be fixed? We tried to rebuild the project many times, restarted the IDE, nothing helped. We also used the _CrtCheckMemory function before that method call to make sure the memory was in a good state, and it returned true ( which means ok ) . I have no more ideas. Do you?

Answer 1

I've seen that before. Generally it occurs because I'm using a class from a Release built .LIB file while I'm in Debug mode. Someone else probably has seen a better example and I'd yield my answer to their answer.