OT: MS-Windows message queue (was Re: Disabling Quit On Telnet)

[Kenneth Brody]

Quoting Bob Rasmussen (Mon, 1 May 2006 07:55:44 -0700 (PDT)):

> On Mon, 1 May 2006, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
[...]
> > Note that this may well not actually be accurate in Windows XP -- XP
> > is known to be able to kill stuck processes when the user clicks the
> > X button; clearly, that widget doesn't belong to the app (as in
> > earlier versions of WIndows), but to the window manager.
>
> I am unfamiliar with this. Can you provide any references?
>
> Note that inevitably there will be SOME way for the user to kill a
> process on Windows.
[...]

My understanding is that the message queue itself on XP (and, I
believe, the rest of the NT-based versions) is handled at the kernel
level.  This means that a frozen app can't freeze the whole system,
as it could in earlier versions of Windows.  I forget which release
this happened in.  So, even if an app is frozen, you can still
switch to other apps and continue running.  Under XP, if an app is
frozen, clicking on the "x" button is handled, at least partly, at
the kernel level, enough to be able to pop up a "this application is
not responding, do you want to close it anyway" dialog.

It's not foolproof, as I have seen XP get to the point of everything
being frozen.  However, that's few and far between.

Under 95/98/Me, you have to Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the task manager,
which will show "not responding" next to the app name, and kill it
from there.

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