I did a bad bad thing.

Not so bad.  Calling a virtual pure function using a pointer to the abstract base class, or calling  it before the derived class has been initialized (in the constructor of the abstract class for example), is a no no.  I did the latter.

Here is Microsoft’s explanation:

No object has been instantiated to handle the pure virtual function call. This error is caused by calling a virtual function in an abstract base class through a pointer which is created by a cast to the type of the derived class, but is actually a pointer to the base class. This can occur when casting from a void* to a pointer to a class when the void* was created during the construction of the base class.

And an explanation and example of the exact thing I did:

   /* Compile options needed: none
   */ 

   class A;

   void fcn( A* );

   class A
   {
   public:
       virtual void f() = 0;
       A() { fcn( this ); }
   };

   class B : A
   {
       void f() { }
   };

   void fcn( A* p )
   {
       p->f();
   }

   // The declaration below invokes class B's constructor, which
   // first calls class A's constructor, which calls fcn. Then
   // fcn calls A::f, which is a pure virtual function, and
   // this causes the run-time error. B has not been constructed
   // at this point, so the B::f cannot be called. You would not
   // want it to be called because it could depend on something
   // in B that has not been initialized yet.

   B b;

   void main()
   {
   }