Oh, ok Never thought of the copy constructor. I'll try doing the derive-all-from-Object on my next project, but this one is already too complicated and screwed up for me to re-structure it at this point I guess I'll try out the Ship* for the time being, and hope it'll work as a quick-fix... But somehow, I get this evil feeling that it was Ship* before and I changed it to Ship to fix some other bug... Oh well, thanks anyways