Thanks for all the help, I still haven't gotten to the bottom of the issue. It’s possible to imagine how that might happen. One obvious mechanism is subclassing (if A is as subclass of B), but you can also imagine it happening in ‘broken’ cases as well. The referenced class is not a subclass of the owning class and they not share anything in common at all code wise. I'm not following what would an example of a ‘broken’ case be? I recommend that you explore this specific case in the debugger, that is, get the address of A, the value of the pointer to B, and see if they match. The memory addresses of the two are unique, I do see the pointer has a "+16" after it's name, presumably a byte offset. Can this be useful at all in determining what is happening here?