Thanks for the quick reply,

51566 does seem very similar. I do not experience the issue from bug 9810 in any of the compilers where I have managed to reproduce the bug - from a quick look it looks somewhat different - and unfortunately changes to access_specifier.hpp don't solve the issue (changing the inheritance modifier or access modifiers in the derived class also does not seem to help). 

I experimented with a few changes but the only case that got rid of the error was the obvious change of making node_type public in index_base.hpp. 

In terms of gcc versions - so far I have reproduced the issue with 4.6.1, 4.6.2 and 4.5.2.

Jacob.