Processes spawned from service occasionally die due to 0xc0000142
in [Win32 Kernel]
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From: JWF on 15 Nov 2006 18:53 I've got a continuous integration build server (CruiseControl.NET) running as a service. It is almost always busy running builds through command line apps (cmd.exe w/ lots of nested nmakes, cl.exe, link.exe, etc. w/ redirected output to log files). The service is running in the context of a domain account so that when a build is done it is easy to copy the built files to a larger share on one of our servers. All of this can crank along for days without problems. Until someone logs into the PC either locally or through remote terminal services. Sometime during the login phase, some program involved in the build will die with a 0xc0000142. The build fails, the email is sent alerting folks = all for nothing because the build didn't really fail. Something about logging into the PC effectively kills a process that is involved in the build. I'm guessing there is some kind of race condition where the act of logging into the PC and creating a new windows station, etc. results in some sort of death in user32.dll or CreateProcess or something. We've seen cl.exe, link.exe, midl.exe, nmake.exe all die because of this at various times. Even cmd.exe can fail with bizarre errors you'd never see otherwise = like a "cd" command failing. Never the same program as the repro conditions are pretty hard, but if you want a build to fail, just login to the box and some part of it will usually die. The service itself is NOT dying - it is always some new program that is starting up during the build. It doesn't matter if the new person logging into the PC is using the same domain account as what the service is running in or not - doesn't matter. Both accounts have administrator privs on the PC. We can repro this on XP Pro SP2 32-bit and XP Pro 64-bit Edition. I've increased the SharedSection= line in the Windows subsystem key in the registry as a KB article indicated non-interactive, non-localsystem account services can run out of desktop heap and fail in bizarre ways. Extremely frustrating and even getting this far has taken weeks in trying to solve it. Any ideas how to stabilize this? In trying to get a small repro case I have a test service that simply runs cmd.exe with a test.bat arg and that just runs lots of little processes - i.e. lots of CreateProcess stuff going on all the time. Setup the service to crank along, log in and out of the PC a bunch and boom = some process will die due to c0000142 8 out of 10 times. |