Stack unwinding with exception handling & Heaps

Alrighty, I''m starting to design myself a little landscape engine (as if we don''t have enough =P) and wanted to use those oh-so-nice exception handlers, slow as they may be, to keep my project leak free. I know both Unreal and Black&White use this but I''m not sure exactly on the internals of Unreal''s guard/unguard or even how BaW does this. They seem like a great way to debug and if I wanted to stop using them for release, I can just add that to the preprocessor. Can anyone point me to some good links for this sort of exception handling? On a 1/2 related note, what are everyones thoughts on heaps? This seems like a great way to keep memory in check but I worry of forgetting to always use the heap. I''m sure there are other disadvantages as well. Would it be a good idea to use a heap for things such as small data structures? -Thanks