strange problem opening ofstream

Hi all,
I am having a really odd problem. My code is spitting out a bunch of
binary files through ofstream. Actually, I have a little wrapper for
binary ofstream operations....where ofstream is a member of the
wrapper (i.e. not a derived class). At some point during the
execution, my program stops writing output files. The ofstream::open()
function is failing. The failbit is true. After the fail, I can't even
open a standard ofstream in the same function....but my ofstreams are
fine in other parts of the code. And the kicker is that when I run the
same executable through eclipse's debugger without any breakpoints,
everything works like I think it should. This is above my head. Any
suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks
Randy
p.s. I am using g++4.2 on OSX.