Working with OpenSceneGraph, and I keep running into this violation issue that I would appreciate some help with. The problem is with the particular line below which happens to be the first in my main function.

 osg::ref_ptr<osg::Node> bench = osgDB::readNodeFile("Models/test.IVE");

I have my models folder right in my directory. The error is as below.

Unhandled exception at 0x68630A6C (msvcr100.dll) in OSG3D.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00421000.

And this is where the problem seems to be coming up.

/** Read an osg::Node from file. 
  * Return valid osg::Node on success,
  * return NULL on failure.
  * The osgDB::Registry is used to load the appropriate ReaderWriter plugin
  * for the filename extension, and this plugin then handles the request
  * to read the specified file.*/
inline osg::Node*  readNodeFile(const std::string& filename)
{
    return readNodeFile(filename,Registry::instance()->getOptions());
}

I would appreciate details on how best to tackle this kind of exception message in the future. Are there tools that make this easy to debug or are there ways to capture the exact issues and fix them? I would appreciate any help with this.

My ultimate goal is to learn how to better debug C++ related issues please. With this, it means reading through the compiler error list http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/850cstw1(v=vs.71).aspx is not enough