Discovered that there is a free full-featured debugger for msvc: windbg ( microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/ … fault.mspx ) 
It doesnt seem really widely advertised. It does pretty much everything the full Visual Studio IDE one does.
Whilst poking around through this, I came across the following:
// We absolutely depend on the static initialization of these pointers
// to happen at load time, before any static constructors are called.
void *(*global_operator_new)(size_t size) = &default_operator_new;
void (*global_operator_delete)(void *ptr) = &default_operator_delete;No idea if its to do with this, but couldnt help thinking this looks ominous?
Hugh