Well my MUD project is back up and working after a big reorganization of globally-scoped data. Yes, it is evil. No, there isn't much of a way around it. It's not a lot, but it needed to be wrapped up in a single class to simplify referencing to in other objects.
Things are running smooth again, but now I have to go back and take out some place holder room code and move its functionality to the new zone system. I changed a helper class over to be a namespace while I had things taken apart, since it never had any data associated with it, just functions. I'm using boost::filesystem now for file access, and it's so much better now. Seriously, I have no idea how I got this far without Boost.
In any case, I'm happy with the progress made in the last week or so. I'm also attending the online GDCU course offered by Ian Schreiber (it's about game design in general), and it's been real interesting so far.