From: Tony Williams 

Rich wrote:
>    Zombies are not what I meant.  Zombies as they exist in unix do not
> exist in Windows.

I was referring to unix zombies, but mistakenly replied to you instead of Paul.

>    The behavior I am describing is that you can't terminate a process or
> thread at an arbitrary location in kernel mode.  This is because the
> kernel mode state must remain in a consistent state.  In user mode this
> doesn't matter because if you are killing a process with prejudice you
> explicitly do not care about user mode state.  Anyway, in order to keep
> kernel mode state consistent threads only terminate at known good
> points.  If the thread is blocked in kernel mode at a point that it can
> not be woken in order to be terminated cleanly, the termination needs to
> be defered until such a point is reached.  This is not a zombie at least
> as the reference to which you linked uses the term..  This is also not
> specific to Windows.

Good explanation - thanks.

--
Tony

> Rich
>
>
>     "Tony Williams"  wrote in
>     message news:4335ccdd{at}w3.nls.net...
>     Frank Haber wrote:
>      >> The process is killed and will terminate when it is unblocked.
>      >
>      >
>      > What is this, some sort of Zen Kill, then?  Do I have to redefine
>     "kill"
>      > as a concept?  It's not dead, Jim?
>      >
>      >
>      > -zombie
>
>     Exactly. They're called zombie processes and they can be a real
>     nuisance.
>
>     http://www.losurs.org/docs/zombies has a good explanation.
>
>     --
>     Tony

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