Corrupted Status Window Message

When I repeatedly running the following code in VS10 debug mode, it behaves as I would expect. Right-clicking executes the expected code and the message in the status bar cycles correctly through the 2 cases. But when I run it as a release, the message is corrupted (I get a load of oriental characters). Making char* rcMess global doesn't help.

The following is the extraxt from WinProc:

switch (message)
{
case WM_RBUTTONDOWN:
if (++parallel==3)
parallel=0;
//update status bar message
char* rcMess;
switch (parallel)
{
case 0:
rcMess="Right-click for parallel 1 execution";
break;
case 1:
rcMess="Right-click for parallel 2 execution";
break;
case 2:
rcMess="Right-click for serial execution";
break;
}
SendMessage(GetDlgItem(hWnd,IDC_STATUS),SB_SETTEXT,2,(LPARAM) (rcMess));
InvalidateRect (hWnd,NULL,TRUE);
UpdateWindow (hWnd);
break;


Any suggestions?

Is UNICODE setting the same in your Debug and Release configurations?

Double education, thank you. Hadn't noted the different configuration between debug and release, and you queued me to look at the implication of Unicode. I also changed char* to wchar_t* which is more appropiate I think.

Thanks for your guidance.