It was far easier to fix than I had expected.

Here’s what I was doing:

std::list<CharData *>::iterator it;
CharData * wch;
for( it = CharList.begin(); it != CharList.end(); )
{
wch = *it;
<stuff happens to wch here, and during combat wch could potentially be killed and deleted>
}

When there was a death in combat, the iterator would get corrupted, because in the destructor for CharData an iterator would remove the CharData from the CharList, corrupting the iterator in the violence update. Due to the chain of function calls between the violence update and where the CharData was actually deleted, there was no way to update the original iterator or do any sort of “safe” removal.

After tinkering around a bit, reading some message boards, it turns out that using a second iterator saves me. One of the iterators is incremented safely, the other damaged/destroyed, and things move on happily because we’re not referencing the broken iterator.

std::list<CharData *>::iterator it;
std::list<CharData *>::iterator jt;
for( it = CharList.begin(); it != CharList.end(); )
{
jt = it++;
ch = *jt;
<dangerous deletion stuff happens here>
}

Pretty strange, but it works.