I'd much prefer to use references everywhere but the moment you use an STL container you have to use pointers unless you really want to pass complex types by value. And I feel dirty converting back to a reference, it just seems wrong.
Is it?
To clarify...
MyType *pObj = ...
MyType &obj = *pObj;
Isn't this 'dirty', since you can (even if only in theory since you'd check it first) dereference a NULL pointer?
EDIT: Oh, and you don't know if the objects were dynamically created or not.