What is it that you don't like about smart pointers? Surely the small performance consequences of using something boost::shared_ptr are outweighed by the exception/leak safety that it provides 99% of the time.

You cannot use valgrind to "make sure your program doesn't leak memory." You can only use valgrind to find SOME memory leaks. Particularly for a long-running process (e.g. a daemon), there could be a memory leak that doesn't show up in valgrind unless you run it for 3 weeks. Or what if the daemon only leaks memory on Thursdays, but you test your program under valgrind on Mondays?

I'm not saying that valgrind isn't useful -- it is. But it is NOT a good idea to rely solely on valgrind to find your memory leaks. A much better idea would be to use other techniques (e.g. smart pointers) to avoid memory leaks in the first place, and then to use valgrind on top of that.