Interrupting Threads in Critical Sections

 Last reviewed: November 2, 1995
Article ID: Q101193
The information in this article applies to:
  • Microsoft Win32 Application Programming Interface (API) included with: 

        - Microsoft Windows NT versions 3.1, 3.5, and 3.51
    - Microsoft Windows 95 version 4.0

If a thread enters a critical section and then terminates abnormally, the critical section object will not be released. Many components of the C Run-time library are not reentrant and use a resource locking scheme to maintain coherency in the multithreaded environment. Thus, a thread that has entered a C Run-time function, such as printf(), could deadlock all access (within that process) to printf() if it terminates abnormally.

This situation could arise if a thread is terminated with TerminateThread() while it holds a resource lock. If this occurs, any thread that tries to acquire that resource lock will become deadlocked.

Additional reference words: 3.10 3.50 4.00 95
KBCategory: kbprg
KBSubcategory: BseMisc

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Last reviewed: November 2, 1995
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