I am building a small ap to test the ASIO library. I run my test ap and things run as expected. But when I set my IDE options (MSVC 8.0) to trap when an exception is thrown, I get an exception thrown before main(.. is invoked. The call stack looks like: msvcr90d.dll!_CxxThrowException(void * pExceptionObject=0x0012fc3c, const _s__ThrowInfo * pThrowInfo=0x0047f944) Line 161 C++ time_pair.exe!boost::copy_exception<boost::exception_detail::bad_alloc_>(const boost::exception_detail::bad_alloc_ & e={...}) Line 47 C++ time_pair.exe!boost::exception_detail::get_bad_alloc<42>() Line 80 + 0x9f bytes C++ time_pair.exe!`dynamic initializer for 'boost::exception_detail::exception_ptr_bad_alloc<42>::e''() Line 94 + 0x28 bytes C++ msvcr90d.dll!_initterm(void (void)* * pfbegin=0x004743c4, void (void)* * pfend=0x00474758) Line 903 C time_pair.exe!__tmainCRTStartup() Line 497 + 0xf bytes C time_pair.exe!mainCRTStartup() Line 399 C this seems to point an attempt to copy something non_copyable in the boost.exception library. Can anyone help me understand what's going on here and what I should do about it? Here is a small test which you can use to demonstrate the problem #include <boost/thread.hpp> int main(int argc, char * argv[]){ return 0; } Robert Ramey