Thread: leaking mutexes, with no mutex in code

hello, i'm running into a very weird problem and maybe someone with a lot of windows experience can chime in.

an application i'm testing with shows it's leaking handles (according to performance monitor). i ran sysinternals handle on the service, and mutants are consistently going up at a rate of 1 every 5 or 6 seconds.

the weird part is, there is not a single reference to a mutex in the code.

the machine is running windows 2000, and the handle leak doesn't appear on another test box running XP...

any ideas? thanks.

>> there is not a single reference to a mutex in the code
It's not just your code running within your process. Use process explorer to see what DLL's are loaded. You may be able to see which module is leaking as well.

gg

thanks for the quick reply!

i opened up process explorer, and indeed there are many DLLs loaded. my application is statically compiled, and the only DLLs loaded are all from microsoft.

You could use the debugger to narrow down in what part of the code the handle count increases.

gg

thanks again!

i'm new to all of these "low-level" debugging...and only recently discovered the sysinternals suite. do you have any links/articles that i could read? i'm guessing you're referring to cdb.exe?