AppInit_DLLs should be renamed Deadlock_Or_Crash_Randomly_DLLs
I have no idea why the window manager team added
this feature
to Windows NT.
It basically says,
"Hi, use this key to violate all the rules known to mankind about
what can legitimately be done in a DllMain function.
Oh, and be
an attractive malware attack vector, too."
I've debugged a few crashes that were traced back to the
AppInit_DLLs key.
What makes them particularly fun is that
the offending DLL is usually not on the stack.
Rather, the fact that a foreign DLL is being loaded
inside USER32's initialization code
means that you're violating the rule against
calling LoadLibrary inside
a DllMain function.
The result of this madness is that DLLs get initialized out of
order, and typically manifests itself in some DLL crashing
trying to use an object (often a critical section)
that it is supposed to have initialized in its
DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH handler.
It crashed because the loader got tricked into initializing
DLLs out of order.
The dependent DLL received its DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH
before the prerequisite DLL.
I end up looking at these failures because the victim DLL
is often a DLL that my group is responsible for.
The window manager folks came to the same conclusion about
AppInit_DLLs,
and it doesn't work any more in Windows Vista by default.
(Nick Kramer describes how to re-enable it.)
