Only in Release mode, Application crashes with "Debug Assertion Failed ... Expression: string iterator not dereferencable"

[read.the news]

Hi all,

Happy new year and thanks for providing protobuf as an open-source
project!

We thought the previous days of migrating from 2.2.0a to 2.3.0, so
yesterday this task has been started.
We have the following setup for our application:
- Windows XP SP3
- C++, Visual Studio 2008, Release build
- Protocol buffers 2.3.0, statically linked
- When building the project, the following warning is shown (not sure
whether related to the error or not):
"Linking...
libprotobuf.lib(common.obj) : warning LNK4075: ignoring '/
EDITANDCONTINUE' due to '/OPT:ICF' specification"

With 2.3.0, the only problem that we encountered was that in the above
setup the command line application crashes immediately after launching
it (it doesn't hit any early breakpoints inside our application, so we
assume currently that this occurs during the google protocol buffers
OR some windows related initialization) with
"Debug Assertion Failed!
Program: MYAPP.exe
File: c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 9.0\vc\include\xstring
Line: 112
Expression: string iterator not dereferencable"

I mention that the error above:
- was reproduced on another two machines, having the correct protobuf
libraries path pointed in case of a Release or Debug build
- doing a Clean & Build does not fix the problem
- when replacing 2.3.0 with 2.2.0a the Release build works

I have attached here ( http://ifile.it/7dwizkx ) a zip file containing
two screens:
- one with the error above
- another one with the "Call stack" trace from the protobuf

Please let me know if I can provide more info about my setup.

Cheers,
Marius Plavan

[read.the news]

Aaahh, I was mistaken above: it's a path related issue.
The generated Project settings (using CMake) are the same for both
Release and Debug. So I had the same path (pointing to the protobuf
debug) in both Debug and Release mode.

Although not quite recommended, with 2.2.0a it worked like above (i.e.
having a "Release" application compiled based on a "Debug" protobuf).
So I think that the error is on my setup!

Thanks,
Marius.

> I have attached here (http://ifile.it/7dwizkx) a zip file containing