Smart Pointer Question.

[wien]

Also when using smart pointers the pointee class destructor must _not_ throw exceptions. This is very important!

This is in fact something that is good to keep as a rule of thumb all the time. You can get yourself into the same kind of mess even if you don't use smart pointers:

struct x
{
    ~x()
    {
        throw std::runtime_error("error");
    }
};

void f()
{
    x an_x;
    throw std::runime_error("error"); // just as bad...
}