I'm not currently working on the code anymore, but thanks for your suggestion. The error I was running into was occuring when I was using an operator= function like you suggest, albiet without the constant parameter. I had created a simple test case to check and see if I could find the basic error in my code, but kept getting the same problem. The code I posted was the most simplistic code I could create, obviously too simplistic since I forgot to include the return statement in my operator= function. Unfortunately I didn't catch that simple error because even when that was corrected the compilation process halted on the same error. I ended up with a work around that was not pretty but allowed me to handle data from the same source in two unrelated scopes. Thanks for the input though.