is there any good programs that detect memory leaks and can point you in the right direction

i need a really good one , not even mind paying real money to buy a professional software that can do it

And when running MinGW on Windows, you're out of luck for free options as far as I've looked.

sorry , its for windows and c++ , and not .net

its a big project and memory leaks are killing it after a bit , just trying to track down the source

I am using this one: http://vld.codeplex.com/

Are you using smart pointers such as std::auto_ptr or std::tr1::shared_ptr?

These will help prevent almost all memory leak issues and really are the way to go in modern C++. Afterall, prevention is better than cure ;)

std::auto_ptr was designed badly and has been deprecated. It was designed badly because they were trying to add the features that std::unique_ptr has, before they had the actual capabilities (move semantics) to do so properly, so they worked around the problem instead of fixing the problem (the problem being a difficult and huge change, but one they successfully made in C++11). One side effect of 'working around' the problem is std::auto_ptr can't be used in most standard library containers.