Question: Perhaps I am worrying over nothing. I desire for data members to closely follow the RAII idiom. How can I initialise a protected pointer member in an abstract base class to null?

I know it should be null, but wouldn't it be nicer to ensure that is universally understood?

Putting initialization code outside of the initializer list has the potential to not be run. Thinking in terms of the assembly operations to allocate this pointer onto the stack, couldn't they be interrupted in much the same way (as the c'tor body) in multithreading environments or is stack expansion guaranteed to be atomic? If the destructor is guaranteed to run then might not the stack expansion have such a guarantee even if the processor doesn't perform it atomically?

How did such a simple question get so expansive? Thanks.

If I could avoid the std:: library that would be great, I am in a minimilist environment.

Answer: 
I have had this problem in the past - and fixed it. 

The images you're displaying are much too large. I love using html or css to resize my images (because who wants to do it manually), but the fact remains that most browsers will hiccup when moving them around. I'm not sure why.

With the exception of Opera, which usually sacrifices resolution and turns websites into garbage.

Resize the largest images, and see if that helps.
Performance in JavaScript is slow, as you're going through many layers of abstraction to get any work done, and many manipulations with objects on the screen are happening in the background. Performance cannot be guaranteed from system to system.

You'll find that with all jQuery animation, you will get a higher "frame rate" (not the right term here, but I can't think of a better one) on faster machines and better-performing browsers (such as Chrome) than you will on slower machines.

If you are curious what all happens in the background when you set a scroll position, or other property, use one of the many tools for profiling your code. Google Chrome comes with one built-in, and for Firefox, you can use Firebug to give you some insight. See also this question: [What is the best way to profile javascript execution?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/855126/what-is-the-best-way-to-profile-javascript-execution)