Strange initialization problem with Gtk::Main

[John Emmas <johne53 tiscali co uk>]

Forgive me if this isn't the right place for asking questions about 
glibmm.  I couldn't find a specific mailing list for it.

I have 2 x gtkmm applications, both written using MSVC.  I should add 
that I have several years experience with MSVC, glib, gtk and glibmm/gtkmm.

Pretty much the very first thing that both apps do is to create a 
Gtk::Main object.  However, the smaller app just creates a local (stack 
based) object as the first thing in main().  The larger app allocates a 
Gtk::Main object using 'new()'.  Both methods result in a call to 
'Gtk::Main:init()' which, in turn, results in a call to 
'Gtk::Main::init_gtkmm_internals()'.  Both functions can be found in 
'gtk/gtkmm/main.cc'.  'init_gtkmm_internals' then calls 'Gio::init()'' 
which then calls 'Gio::wrap_init()' (which is in 
'glibmm/gio/giomm/wrap_init.cc').  So far, so good.

AFAICT the execution path is absolutely identical for both programs.  
The same functions get called in the same order with no apparent 
problems - BUT - at line 456 of 'gio/giomm/wrap_init.cc' there's a 
comment which says:-

      // Register the gtkmm types

That comment is followed by around 100 calls to "whatever::get_type()".  
In the small app, every call succeeds.  In the larger app, every call 
fails and I'm totally baffled as to why. One possible explanation is 
that for simplicity, I built gtkmm and glibmm as static libs, rather 
than DLLs.  At the time I remember getting told that to build as Windows 
DLLs I needed a utility called "gendef" but there was some doubt about 
how diligently it was being kept up-to-date, so a static library build 
seemed simpler - but now I'm not so sure....

In the smaller app it makes no difference as everything is contained in 
the main exe.  But the larger app uses some DLLs.  Some of those DLLs 
(and the main app itself) need to link to glibmm and gtkmm so of course, 
each will have its own copy of glibmm and gtkmm, rather than them being 
shared objects.  Could that be causing a problem like this??

John