Memmory Issues and Threads

I am writing a replacement GINA for windows XP. My logon dialog box starts a thread (using CreateThread()) when it loads. The thread is passed the handle to the dialog box and then monitors the the registry for specific changes in order to adjust my dialog box's controls accordingly. Whenever the dialog is refreshed or closed I send a TerminateThread() command to end the thread so that when the logon dialog box reloads itself I dont't get multiple threads running. However this method seems to be causing some memory issues. According to MSDN, TerminateThread() is a risky call for this reason.

Quote:

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"If the target thread is allocating memory from the heap, the heap lock will not be released."

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I am new to C and know almost nothing about memory allocation. All I am doing in the thread is getting some handles to some graphic controls and using those handles to manipulate the graphics on the dialog box. I have noticed that everytime i refresh the dialog, windows alocates more memory. This can continue until the machine has no available memory left. It seems to me that the above quote would explain this memory leak.

Is there a command I can call everytime I terminate the thread that will also look for unused memory and de-allocate it? Thanks for your help.

Small world - I'm working on a Gina replacement myself :)

You are responsible for your threads clean termination. A clean termination simply implies that the thread deallocates any allocated resources and returns from the thread function. So all that's really needed is a mechanism to "tell" your thread is time to return.
You can use bool variable or a Win32 synchronization object like an event - whatever works.

gg

That was how I originally intented to set it up. However the thread takes about ten seconds to completes one cycle of its loop. Here is what happens.

Works fine here
Dialog is started and sets the thread's bool to true.
user logs on, dialog closes and bool is set to false
thread closes appropriately

Bad scenario
Dialog is started and sets the thread's bool to true.
user hits cancel and dialog closes setting the bool to false
the dialog immediately is called again setting the bool to true
the thread never sees the bool as false and continues to run
A new thread is started since it is called from the dialog box.

Basically the screensaver, a dialog timeout, or the user hitting cancel cause another thread to open before the other thread knows to terminate itself causing multiple threads to be open at one time. This seems to be a waste. However once the user logs onto the machine the bool will be set to false and all the the threads will have time to recognize the bool as false and terminate.

You know as I am writing this I am thinking of a more efficient way to call the thread globally, outside of the dialog callback.

I was just hoping there was a simple command that would perform some garbage collection and free up all the un-linked resources. That way I wouldn't have to re-structure my code. Thanks for your response.