Debugging strategy to find the cause of bad_alloc

Question

I have a fairly serious bug in my program - occasional calls to new() throw a bad_alloc.

From the documentation I can find on bad_alloc, it seems to be thrown for these

Answer 1

bad_alloc can also be thrown when you have a bug that is overwriting the pointers that the heap uses to manage the pool of memory that it uses to allocate from.

The most common cause of that is that you are writing past the end of an allocated block of memory, (or before the start, but that's less common). Almost as common is writing to a memory block after it has been freed. This is called heap corruption.

Also, I should note, a 32 bit process in Windows has at most 2GB of address space (3GB for large-address-aware programs). This is regardless of how much RAM you have installed, the memory is virtual, and allocations don't fail until you run out of address space, even if you only have 1GB of RAM.

Here is a good discussion of memory corruption in C++ http://www.eventhelix.com/RealtimeMantra/Basics/debugging_software_crashes_2.htm