Microsoft KB Archive/156484

= Process Launched with CreateProcess May Terminate Prematurely =

Article ID: 156484

Article Last Modified on 11/1/2006

-

APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0 Developer Edition
 * Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Standard Edition
 * Microsoft Internet Information Server 3.0

-



This article was previously published under Q156484



SYMPTOMS
Cmd.exe, Perl.exe, or other console-mode applications may fail to initialize properly and terminate prematurely when launched by a service using the CreateProcess or CreateProcessAsUser APIs. The calling process has no way of knowing that the launched console-mode application has terminated prematurely.

In some instances, calling GetExitCode against the failed process indicates the following exit code:

128L ERROR_WAIT_NO_CHILDREN - There are no child processes to wait for.

In multithreaded applications, the premature termination causes desktop heap leaks. Over time the desktop heap is exhausted, which results in User32.dll or Kernel32.dll initialization errors.



MORE INFORMATION
 Internet Information Server (IIS) may exhibit this problem intermittently when processing CGI or Perl scripts. In this case the browser returns the following error when executing CGI scripts:

CGI Error

The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers. The headers it did return are:.

 Remote Command Service (RCMD) may also exhibit this problem. RCMD clients experience connect and disconnect messages when they attempt to access a server running RCMD service. This may be used as a test application to see if another service is running into this problem. Other third-party services (such as Patrol from BMC Software) are also known to fail because of this problem.



RESOLUTION
To resolve this problem, please see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base for more information:

ARTICLE-ID: 142676

TITLE : Overcoming User32.dll Initialization Failure Errors

ARTICLE-ID: 175687

TITLE : Win32k.sys Causes STOP 0x0000001e and 0x0000000a On SMP

Keywords: kbenv kbinterop kbprb KB156484

-

[mailto:TECHNET@MICROSOFT.COM Send feedback to Microsoft]

© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.