I've deleted my old thread on the same topic because it had 0 replies and I've been doing a lot of testing with my program to get the problem to arise again, so I think it will be easier to help me this time. Here's what I've found out:

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^{Since it's kind of small on these forums, here are what the captions read from left to right, top to bottom:
"What's supposed to happen: Other plane explodes, you lose health" | "Bad: Tail bounding boxes do not recognize eachother" | "Bad: rear side of wings do not recognize eachother"
"Moving left wing-to-wing causes crash" | "Moving up left wing to right wing causes crash, right side does not do this" | "Moving left with a NEAR collision (enemy plane is not moving) causes crash"}

Alternatively you can just view the image at imgur.

This is a screenshot of the bounding boxes drawn around the objects. It seems to only be Character left side to Enemy right side that causes problems. It was harder to get the error to occur in debug mode for some reason (and also explosion animations don't work in debug mode - weird) but I finally got it while driving left straight against an enemy, wing-to-wing.

Just before the error occurs, the error flags on line 42 of object.cpp. The call stack looks like this:

0 00404070 OBJECT::get_x(this=0xfeeefeee) | object.cpp ln 42
1 00404AA4 ROOM::step(this=0x5ea370) | room.cpp ln 81
2 00403BFA game_loop() | main.cpp ln 129
3 00403D6F main(argc=1, argv=0x3015d0) | main.cpp ln 204

Those pieces of code are as follows:
object.cpp

int OBJECT::get_x(){
    return x; //LINE 42!!!
}

room.cpp

main.cpp game_loop()

if(event.type == ALLEGRO_EVENT_TIMER){
    redraw = true;
    roomLib.allRooms[currentLevel].step(); //LINE 129!!!
}

The portion of code in ROOM::step that is causing the error is the collision detection portion. For some reason, the second instance that is called for collision testing is throwing the error when its x value is trying to return but this only happens DURING a collision which seems strange because these values are called every single step but only during a collision the object does not want to give up its x value (it doesn't want to die!).

It's not an issue with the array activeInstances changing sizes and accidentally accessing an element out of bounds because in that case it would happen for every collision and, additionally, no elements are deleted from the array during this phase, they are only flagged for deletion by setting their boolean variable <code>dead</code> to true.

Edit: I didn't realize I was changing the size of the vector by creating the explosion object. I've altered the code so that all OBJECTs now have a void OBJECT::on_death(); function that creates the explosion. I've updated the ROOM function above and commented it with //NEW LINE. Unfortunately, this has not eliminated the error.

For reference, here are the functions called by the collision checking:

int OBJECT::get_x(){
    return x;
}

int OBJECT::get_y(){
    return y;
}

Code called by the collide functions:

int OBJECT::get_object_id(){
    return objectId;
}

void OBJECT::kill(){
    dead = true;
}

And last but not least:
globals.h

enum OBJECT_IDS{
    idObject, idCharacter, idIsland, idExplosionSm, idExplosionLg,
    idBullet, idEnemy, idEnemyOlive
};

Yeah, I actually had PLANNED to delete my old thread after posting the new one only to find out that I can't actually delete it, so I just edited it to point to this thread. Sorry!

As for my issue, I edited my above post to reflect that I realized that I was ADDING an OBJECT* to the activeInstances vector but fixing THAT issue did not solve my problem.

I've added the start=# i didn't know about that, instead I just commented the line The error now occurs on line 81 because of the line I added in ROOM::step() ((*it)->on_death();)

It may also be worth noting that I can also get a crash when a bullet collides with an enemy plane if the bullet registers its collision after it reaches the back of the left side of the wing bounding box.

That's what I was thinking too but the only place in the code that things are added to the vector is:

So I don't think it's an uninitialized pointer. I haven't been able to find information with my usual resource, google, on whether or not I can change the size of a vector inside a range based for using that vector. I suppose it comes down to whether or not the vector's size is checked on each iteration or if it's just checked at the beginning.

I don't think that's possible unless it's due to some error that it doesn't get inserted because the loop before it checks if the depth is <= the last object in the vector and if it's not then it goes into the for loop to find out where it belongs.

Even if for some bizarre reason the object isn't inserted like it should be, I just wouldn't have any way to access that object, it wouldn't cause an error. I'll add a catch just to be safe when I'm back at my computer though.

Yes the explosions are added to activeInstances and deleted once their animation completes.

Ahhh, I forgot that adding elements to a vector invalidates iterators. I'll fix that first thing tomorrow. Any idea why those overlapping bounding boxes aren't registering a collision though?

Wow most helpful post of all time. I can't believe I missed that obj2bb.y2 was supposed to be y1... so dumb and so easy. That page with all the memory bit patterns is also SUPER helpful. I didn't realize memory addresses could be helpful to me for anything other than comparison. Thank you!

Yes everything is working great now. I was adding to the vector inside a loop trying to iterate through the vector so sometimes an object would take 2 steps where it was supposed to take 1 and on rare occasions it would even crash the game. I just created a separate vector called instancesToCreate which holds all of the instances created that step and then at the end of the step I call void ROOM::activateInstances() and that moves all of the contents of instancesToCreate into activeInstances and everything works perfectly.

That collision detection thing was big too Thank you again!