If someone could help me diagnose this segmentation fault, I'd appreciate it greatly. It has stumped me for a couple of days. I'm deserializing a non-polymorphic derived class, and Boost crashes when it attempts to process the base class: Here is the pseudocode: struct Base { int id_; std::string long_name_; template<Archive> void serialize(Archive & ar, const unsigned int file_version) { ar & BOOST_SERIALIZATION_NVP(id_); ar & BOOST_SERIALIZATION_NVP(long_name_); // SEGFAULT OCCURS HERE } } struct Derived : public Base { template<Archive> void serialize(Archive & ar, const unsigned int file_version) { ar & BOOST_SERIALIZATION_BASE_OBJECT_NVP(Base); … } } I tried the methods described at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3396330/where-to-put-boost-class-export-f... for exporting the derived class using BOOST_CLASS_EXPORT, but none of them affected the segfault. I guess that it isn't really necessary to export non-polymorphic derived classes. Anyway, the code crashes in archive/basic_xml_iarchive.hpp in this code at line 92: // Anything not an attribute - see below - should be a name value // pair and be processed here typedef detail::common_iarchive<Archive> detail_common_iarchive; template<class T> void load_override( #ifndef BOOST_NO_FUNCTION_TEMPLATE_ORDERING const #endif boost::serialization::nvp< T > & t, int ){ this->This()->load_start(t.name()); this->detail_common_iarchive::load_override(t.value(), 0); // SEGFAULT OCCURS HERE this->This()->load_end(t.name()); } In GDB, "this" has a valid address ( 0x7fffffffdb30) as does "t" (0x7ffffff487b0). In GDB, executing t.name() yielded the correct name "long_name_", but when executing t.value(), the debugger complained about an invalid address: RuntimeError: Cannot access memory at address 0xffffffffffffffe8 That error message comes from GDB's Python utility for pretty-printing strings (the variable being deserialized is a std::string), which is invoked when I print t.value(), but regardless something is wrong in t.value(). Does any of this suggest what I might be doing wrong? Thanks for any help.