Appears to fail after the statement ends, so during the cleanup of the
anonymous string object.

If you switch it to be named like:

string foo = contentGet();
cerr << "Result: '" << foo << "'" << endl;
cerr << "Done." << endl;

it will crash when the function exits, so it's something to do with destroying
that string object.

Running the nocygwin version with gdb gets us:

warning: HEAP[xxx-nocygwin.exe]: 
warning: Invalid Address specified to RtlFreeHeap( 003D0000, 0043D150 )