Cheers Ravi!

Thanks for your reply! I don't know, to be honest. The problem was occurring when I AltF4ed or clicked on Close Window but not when I clicked on my 'Exit' button. However, it looks like it was a corrupt memory problem I had with a member variable I'd assigned to the heap and was using to pass data between threads. I've changed the communication to the following: In the sending thread: ControlDlg \* pParent = (ControlDlg \*) this->GetParent(); ColourAlphaEnvelope \* s = new ColourAlphaEnvelope; \*s = m\_ColourEnvelope; pParent->PostMessage(CM\_COLOURBOUNDS, reinterpret\_cast<WPARAM>(s)); and in the recieving dialog I used afx_msg LRESULT CRectArtDlg::OnCmColourbounds(WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam) { std::auto_ptr<ColourAlphaEnvelope> s(reinterpret_cast<ColourAlphaEnvelope*>(wParam)); m_colourEnvelope = *s; return 0; } I bet there are dozens of better ways of doing this (not least since a quick Google reveals that auto_ptr is depracated) but I haven't had a crash and the compiler isn't telling me there is a memory leak.

This looks interesting. May be I'll get around to having a look at what is going on with these messages eventually. It would be an interesting exercise. However, now I have seen that it isn't just short cuts to shutdown.exe that cause Windows to close down in a way that can cause unsaved work to be lost I've come to the conclusion that this is a possible oversight by Microsoft and I'll probably leave it for a while to see if they change it back themselves before I attempt to write my own fix. Oh for just a little bit more time per day to get things done...

Thanks, Jochen. This did the trick.

Glad I could be of help. As for your conclusion, keep in mind that sending an ID of the element requires you to also pass the container that this ID refers to! Otherwise the function won't know what to do with that ID. Whether that ID is an iterator or index value doesn't matter in this regard - neither have an inherent knowledge of the container they refer to. If the container is class scope, and you pass an ID to a class member function, that would work. But from a design view, doing so would still be questionable as the function actually shouldn't need to care about the rest of the container - you have introduced an unnecessary dependency. If at some point you realize you want to use that same function for elements not related to this class, you cannot easily do it, due to that dependency.

You're welcome, good luck with your programs. It's time for a new signature.

Beaten to the punchline again cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP

David, the code and article is rewritten, now. Thanks so much for your help. I used SendMessageTimout and it worked nicely! Thanks, Ben.

Thanks! That's the impression I've been getting.

Hmm. Looking this up in MSDN I have found out that CTime has constructors for accepting SYSTEMTIME and FILETIME objects. Looks like I'll be rewriting the code with an even better solution!

Thanks!

Michael, You are my hero! I was interested in this header file because I wanted to make text entries in a list control appear in different colours. I have just looked at your 'Neat Stuff to do in List Controls Using Custom Draw' and used the method you describe and it has worked like a dream.

I've got this sorted out now. The full solution to the problem is written up here. Looking at the above message, it seems to me that, at the time, my mistake was in the CNode::Serialize function where I had simply tried to serialize the CObArray object (of sub nodes) with the insertion and extraction operators along with the other node object members. The way to get this to work, it turns out, is to not treat the collection of sub nodes like the other node object members but instead call its CObArray serialization function. Hence the node object serialization function looks like this: void CNode::Serialize(CArchive &ar) { // Call the ancestor function CSubNode::Serialize(ar); int iNoSubNodes = 0; // Are we writing? if (ar.IsStoring()) { // Get the number of sub nodes iNoSubNodes = m\_oaSubNodes.GetSize(); // Write variables in order ar << m\_iSubNodePosition << m\_strString << iNoSubNodes; } else // Read variables in order ar >> m\_iSubNodePosition >> m\_strString >> iNoSubNodes; // Serialize the array of sub nodes m\_oaSubNodes.Serialize(ar); }