Colpec this thread was intended for general discussions on programming, so everybody expected a question
Of course there is space for for sharing experiences generally we refer to the chit-chat thread.
BTW your experience is the demonstration of the most common problem when debugging a complex application: you spend a lot of time looking around the point where it crashes, but the problem come from far.
One time it took me a couple of weeks to find where I was trashing the content of my variables.
In the last days I had a long discussion on another forum with a guy, whose skill in programming is high (looking at his code), complaining that a MS function don't work and will never work. I showed him that compiling in C his own code it worked, but no way, he was convinced that the function cannot work. I'm sure that his problem was elsewhere, I hope he solved by now...