Bug 3162

If an Any is stored in a static member variable or contained a ACE_Singleton<>, the program may fail/crash on shutdown when the Any attempts to decrement the reference count of referenced typecode. This is because static typecode objects referenced by the Any may have already been destroyed. With the GNU C++ runtime, this manifests itself as a call to a pure virtual method which results in a call to abort(). 

The CORBA C++ Mapping does not describe the lifecycle of static typecode objects so an argument could be made that they should not be used in static constructors or destructors (and by extension ACE_Singleton<>s). On the other hand, the C++ mapping does not explicitly forbid this use case, and other ORBs do support it, so an argument could be made that TAO should too.

The root cause of this is that TAO's static typecodes are not reference counted (they have a null reference counting strategy). To do so, they would need to be dynamically created by static constructors (with a factory of some sort, though there are some complications to ensure that they're constructed in order).  One problem with this is that we have traditionally shied away from static constructors and destructors in TAO because of issues on embeded platforms like VxWorks.