Showing archive results for 2012

Last time we saw how to view the stack of threads that were terminated as part of process teardown from the kernel debugger. You can do the same thing from a user-mode debugger, and it's actually a bit easier there. (The user-mode debugger I'm using is the one that comes with the Debugging Tools for Windows, the debugging engine that goes by a n...

Back in the day (and perhaps still true today), Charles Petzold's Programming Windows was the definitive source for learning to program Windows. The book is so old that even I used it to learn Windows programming, back when everything was 16-bit and uphill both ways. The most recent edition is Programming Windows, 5th Edition, which was published ...

As we saw some time ago, process shutdown is a multi-phase affair. After you call , all the threads are forcibly terminated. After that's done, each DLL is sent a notification. You may be debugging a problem with handling that suggests that some of those threads were not cleaned up properly. For example, you might assert that a reference count ...

A customer reported a problem that occurred only when they installed a particular application. If they uninstalled it, then the problem went away. After installing the application, the "Run As" context menu option stopped working. The customer didn't provide any other details, but we were able to make an educated guess as to what was going on. A ...

Mike Dunn wonders what the Microspeak term parking lot means. I'm not familiar with this term either, and the first document I turned up during my search was a PowerPoint presentation that said "Avoid using Microsoft jargon terms, such as parking lot and dogfood." Yeah, that wasn't much help. From what I can gather, the term parking lot starte...

Commenter rs asks, "Why does Windows (historically) return 2 for while Wine returns zero?" The function multiplies the first two parameters and divides by the third. Therefore, the mathematically correct answer for MulDiv(1, -0x80000000, -0x80000000) is 1, because a × b ÷ b = a for all nonzero b. So both...

This upcoming Sunday is Mother's Day in the United States. In recognition of the holiday last year, a local church displayed the following message on its message board: "God couldn't be / everywhere / so God made mothers / German speaking." This explains why your mother speaks German. POIDH The church in question has an evening German-lan...

A computer running some tests encountered a mysterious crash: A colleague of mine quickly diagnosed the proximate cause. *Something* marked the code page PAGE_READWRITE, instead of PAGE_EXECUTE_READ. I suspect a bug in a driver. FOO is just a victim here. This diagnosis was met with astonishment. "Wow! What made you think to check the pr...

One source of cheap amusement is searching for spelling errors in the registry. For example, one program tried to register a new file extension, or at least they tried, except that they spelled wrong. And they wonder why that feature never worked. My discovery was that my registry contained the mysterious key . After some debugging, I finally...

A customer was working on improving their application startup performance. They found that if their application was launched immediately after a fresh boot, the act of dismissing their splash screen was taking over 5% of their boot time. Their code removed the splash screen by calling . They suspect that the splash screen thread has, for some reaso...