Debugging Critical Section lockups

[Robert Shearman]

David D. Hagood wrote:

> I may have a repeatable case of an error in locking critical sections, 
> so I'd like some pointers as to how to debug this.
>
> The case occurs with the installer for Delorme Street Atlas 5 - on my 
> 2GHz Athlon desktop it runs without a hitch, but on my oooooold slow 
> laptop (how old is it? It's sooooo old, it used PIO for the disk!) the 
> program locks up 100% of the time at startup, with 2 threads trying to 
> take different critical section locks and dying. It looks like the 
> standard deadlock condition: one thread tries to lock A-B-C, the other 
> tries to lock A-C-B, and so they deadlock.


Unless the installer is using TryEnterCriticalSection, I would expect 
CPU utilisation to be 0% when deadlocking. Relay logs generally give the 
best clues in this kind of situation.

-- 
Rob Shearman