Do you know of any good reading material on some good exception handling techniques? Exceptional C++ - http://www.gotw.ca/publications/xc++.htm More Exceptional C++ - http://www.gotw.ca/publications/mxc++.htm - Wilka

www.naviscope.com will stop popups for you, and has other advantages - such as getting the next page before you click next when looking at search results. So need to waste the 1 or 2 seconds waiting for the page :) If you want to get rid of other stuff that you don't ask for, like the spyware that gets installed by some 'free' programs, try Ad-Aware from www.lavasoftusa.com. - Wilka

You could use VMWare (http://www.vmware.com) to install lots of the same OS, but each with a different version of IE.

Have you tried benchmarking them? I tried a few tests a while back and each of tests where either almost the same, or STL was a lot faster. The only exception being a map lookup. The reason the MFC collection classes exist is because when they where first created there was no STL, or indeed templates - hence CObArray, CObList, etc. There are many reasons to use STL in preference to MFC for collections, the only reason I can think of to use MFC over STL is "because we always have".

Programming Pearls 2nd (ISBN 0201657880) has a section that will probably be useful for this (column 13), you should probably take a look if you can.