I have an odd thing going on with a defualt copy constructor to a class who's sole private data member is a vector<char> ... For some reason I end up with the first 4 chars being 3 goblygook asccii chars and a space even if the original was valid alpha numaric charictors. The call to the default copy constructor happens when I pass an object by value into a function do some work on it and return by refrence. Any thoughts?