Reasonable static initialization assurance

[corey taylor]

> >Do you know of any difference in this area with the OSX gcc?
> 
> I'm not aware if XCode 2.1 / GCC 4.0 on OS X has any particular caveats
> other than the usual suspects applicable to all platforms.

So it's probably just a memory clear value discrepency?  Some value
that the memory is "initialized" with causes a false std::string setup
and fails on an assignment.

It was amazingly consistant once it started to fail though -- we have
no idea yet why the code change caused the failure.  The code
shouldn't have been like that anyway, but not knowing what caused thee
memory failure is a pain :)

corey