well i am a trooper and 6th time is the charm, i think i have things going in a simple and non-fragile way. phew.
things got much easier once i figured out how the shared_dynamic_cast is supposed to work.
gbw2kNativeWindowPtr nativeWindow=boost::shared_dynamic_cast
i was putting gbWindowPtr in for the template argument. i can make some guesses to why it has to work that way when I think how I would implement my own, but it is not intuitive.
so i'll play around with this stuff some more and see how things feel. i think i'll be writing my halloween costume with it.