failure to construct global object

[Gisli Ottarsson <gisli at adams dot com>]

I work on a commercial program which has been running on Linux for
over a year.  Recently an object in global scope was moved from the
heap, which broke the Linux build.  No such problem was experienced
with SGI, Sun, HP, IBM or Microsoft compilers.

To be totally clear, what used to be:

  MyClass* pObject;  // instantiate in code

became

  MyClass Object;

The problem seems to be that the constructor for this object is never
called.  

Two questions:

 1) How do I gather useful information about this problem so that
    I may write a proper bug report.

 2) Are there any ways to coerce the construction.

May thanks for the efforts of all you beautiful people.

Gisli