Treeview CRITICAL Error

[dhk <dhkuhl optonline net>]

I have a program that I'm trying to clean up.  There is a lot going on 
so please bear with me and I try to keep it brief.

First - the build environment uses autoconf.  The only reason I mention 
this is because in the Makefile.am when the -g options is added to the 
CFLAGS is only seems to compile when the -O (Optimization) option is 
present.  However the options is set as -O0 (that's Dash-Oh-Zero) which 
should turn optimization off.

Second - when stepping through the program with the debugger the usual 
strange looping occurs due to optimization; I can't explain why it 
happens, but it does.  This leads to a problem where many variables are 
optimized out.  In the debugger variables are set as "<value optimized 
out>".  Does anyone know if this is normal/ok or does it indicate sloppy 
programming?  I'd like to be able to compile the program without 
optimization, but so far this has just been an annoyance.

Third - the problem.  The application window has a notebook with a 
handful of tabs, each with different tree views on them.  The program 
seems to run fine.  However, when the second tab is selected, no matter 
what the previous tab was, the following three error lines get printed 
about three times.

(prog:16939): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_tree_store_get_value: assertion 
`column < tree_store->n_columns' failed

(prog:16939): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_set_property: assertion 
`G_IS_VALUE (value)' failed

(prog:16939): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_value_unset: assertion 
`G_IS_VALUE (value)' failed

Now from the debugger these lines appear to get printed on calls to 
gtk_tree_store_prepend() and gtk_tree_view_set_cursor(); however, 
nothing fails, only the Gtk-CRITICAL messages get printed.

Now the strange part.  The functions that call gtk_tree_store_prepend() 
and gtk_tree_view_set_cursor() get a tree view pasted in as a gpointer 
and then it's cast to a GtkWidget.  In the debugger when the tree view 
is printed it says "<value optimized out>" and when printed with a star 
'*' preceding the tree view it displays 0x0:  NULL.  An assert of the 
NULL tree view doesn't fail.  Then the tree model is gotten from the 
tree view and that says the same thing as the tree view "<value 
optimized out>" and 0x0.  An assert on the tree model doesn't fail 
either.  Then the CRITICAL messages are printed on the calls to the two 
gtk_tree_...() function above.

Anyone, what is going on? and what am I dealing with?

Thanks a heap in advance,

dave