AVL Tree rotation help

I found a way to do what I wanted, and have the same problem, marvelous.

The entire code is here: http://pastebin.com/wMfDtwfg for the int implementation
or here: http://pastebin.ca/1964677 for the string implementation.

My test is just a simple for loop that inserts a million int in ascending order. When I insert ten million the program breaks. One million int insertions uses up about a gig and a half of memory. But, I don't get any errors unless I do ten million inserts.

What I will be doing is inserting strings from a text file. Specifically a dictionary, and words starting with S. It's a pretty big list. I'm getting weird heights like 4868, that I don't get when I simply insert an int. Could the problem lie here?

Code:

---

    ifstream inFile;
    AVLTree dictionary;
    inFile.open("dictS.txt");
    string word;
    string definition;
    string dump;   
    while (!inFile.eof())
    {   
   
        inFile >> dump;
        if (dump.at(0) == '*')
        {   
            if (word != "")
            {
                dictionary.insert(word, definition);
                word = dump;
               
            }   
            else
            {
                word = dump;   
            }
            definition = "";
        }
        else
        {
            definition = definition + " " + dump;
        }

    }
    inFile.close();

---

Any help would be appreciated.

EDIT: Updating first post.

I guess I've narrowed the problem down to this, the comparison of keys I use for insertion doesn't work for strings, at least not how I thought they would. And so I suppose I either need to write code to compare the strings how I want them compared (alphabetically) or revise how I handle multiple instances of the same key.

Code:

---

if (search ->key < parent->key)
.....
else if (search->key > parent->key)
.....
else // is the problem

---

nope, wrong about that too.

issue solved though.