Latex figures disappearing? Why not...

Latex is a fine system but sometimes it have its own quirks. For example yesterday I spend at least one hour trying to figure out where are my figures. Figures are parsed, but then, nothing is placed on the page. Even latex logs were not helping. Today, I know what was the problem -- I had one figure which is together with the previous figure longer than one page. This is normal case for figures. However, I am using the two-column style, the first figure is spanning two columns, the second one just one column. And apparently, if you combine all these aspects together you get -- nothing. Big nothing instead of second figure. And more interestingly, big nothing instead of all successive figures. So, beware of the long figures!