> >The idea behind setting the upper bit of the spin count is
> >to solve a somewhat thorny problem. Critcal sections in
> >contention create the events on demand. If the event
> >creates fail (lack of available memory etc) then these
> >API's would raise exceptions (both the Enter and Leave
> >functions). Starting in Windows XP we no longer raise
> >exceptions in the out of memory cases (For Enter and
> >Leave, Initialize still does) and so applications wanting
> >to be robust in this environment don't have to set this
> >bit. The critical section code falls back to a global
> >object in reduced memory situations (when event allocation
> >fails). For Windows XP this bit is ignored as a result.
> >Neill.

> However, this has also the drawback of getting things still more
> indetermined. I used the upper bit mostly not because I'm afraid of
> exceptions, but to know that I have an upper limit of time used to
> perform the EnterCriticalSection() call by not having to create the
> event object in EnterCriticalSeciton().  And if it could happen in XP
> that there is silently used a single global object, this is getting
> even worse :-(

> (I know that NT is not a hard realtime system. However, it  is
> behaving quite well in soft realtime tasks, especially on SMP
> systems.)

> Daniel