Comments by Octopod (Top 5 by date)

But you can't check the memory leaks of a release builds with the _CrtDumpMemoryLeaks trick. You can't always use debug build, for example when doing a diagnostic in production context. In addition, as you point, release builds can have different behavior.

Coming to the thrid party code, the callstack shows you the code that make call to the third party, which can lead you to understanding a wrong use of this third party code. And sometimes you have the .pdb of release third party code, revealing the full callstack (check Symbols servers, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee416588(v=vs.85).aspx#ID4EUG, it might be of interest).

About the VS2010 I think you're facing to the same troubles we can encounter with VS2008 or other versions. Some applications are more unstable with LiveHeap hooked on them. I'm not sure this is linked to the version of VS.

Reason for my vote of 2
Thank you for this hint for who don't know it already. The downside is that with _CrtDumpMemoryLeaks, only the allocations made by your code will be catched and reported. By using LiveHeap, you can catch all allocations, even those that are done in release code and in third party code.

You should then try to put breakpoints to embrace specific functions rather than the all program, and see if it helps. Or you can also, without breakpoints, starting LiveHeap before doing a specific action while your application is already started (like opening a file in your application, then closing it, to get leaks for file opening).

LiveHeap gives you a real time view of all your allocations. The trick of using it between the beginning and the end of your application execution allow to gather memory leaks. That's all.

ApplicationVerifier is a front end on gflags, which trigger a set of checks that are embedded into the windows kernel (adding guard pages to allocations, collecting stack trace for future use in WindDbg, checking API calls, etc.).

I would say that both are to be used for tracking leaks, bugs & defects. Different tools, different purposes.