Strange display problem with gtk-win32 and VC++

[John Emmas <johne53 tiscali co uk>]

For the past few years I've been migrating my Windows apps to GTK+ which I now tend to use in preference to 
Microsoft's MFC.  However, I've always been conscious of the fact that the official gnome binaries are 
(apparently) built using the 'C' runtime that equates to VC6.  VC6 has been obsolete for nearly a decade and 
is utterly useless for building modern-day apps.  As it happens, I'm building with VC8 but I'm worried about 
the potential problems of mixing VC6 and VC8 runtimes in the same application.

Fortunately, the more recent releases of GTK+ come with Visual Studio projects supplied as part of the 
sources.  So I decided to try and build libgtk-win32 and its dependencies, using VC8.

To test my build, I used a very simple "Hello World" app.  In fact it's the Hello World example from Andrew 
Krause's book 'Foundations of GTK+ Development'.  It launches a very simple window whose title is "Hello 
World!".  The window has a gtk label which is supposed to display the text "Welcome to GTK+".

If I build the app and link it to the official gnome binaries, it works perfectly well.  However, if I 
rebuild those binaries (using the various Visual Studio projects supplied with gtk / glib etc) the app 
doesn't work.  The window and title display correctly but the label (which is supposed to say "Welcome to 
GTK+") just displays a sequence of 15 squares.  The number of squares is always related to the label.  So if 
I shorten the label text to 10 characters, I get 10 squares etc. I'm not sure if this mailing list supports 
file attachments but if there's a way to attach a file, I have a small screenshot available which illustrates 
the problem.

Anyway, has anyone here ever seen this kind of thing before?  Or can anyone suggest a particular place where 
I should start looking for the problem?

John