You need to provide a bit more context about your code. That said, I ran into something similar which may be the problem you're having. I had code similar to this: int* pi = NULL; int i = *pi; // Generates an access violation In debug builds, an exception was thrown from my SE handler and caught, but not in release builds. As it turned out, in release builds, the optimiser was correctly removing this code because it had no effect. :doh: Not sure what you're doing, but if it's simple test case like mine, you might want to turn off the optimiser for that block of code: #pragma optimize("", off) Brad

Getting a stack trace including source file and line number is possible in both debug and release builds. The key is the EXCEPTION_POINTERS parameter. You need to use the symbols engine API which is in the dbghelp.dll library in the Platform SDK to translate the exception pointers into more useful information. The best reference I've found for this is "Debugging Windows Applications" by John Robbins. He used to write the Bug Slayer column in MSDN magazine. You can find lots of his archived articles over at the href='http://msdn.microsoft.com'>MSDN site. There is probably lots of useful stuff elswhere on the web but I don't have any links handy. Google for StackWalk or "win32 stack trace" and you'll probably find some useful links. HTH Brad