In our code at work (mostly C++, no Perl) someone put something in to try to write a stack trace to a log by intercepting windows structured exceptions. This makes debugging stack and heap corruption issues more difficult, IMO. The stack trace we manage to write is almost always nonsense for memory problems. What I want generally when debugging is a memory dump I can look at with windbg with as few operations attempted as possible since the corruption happened. i.e. I want an abort(). Whoever wrote MS's new functions like strcpy_s seems to agree, though they give you a way to override the behaviour: CRT Parameter Validation.