leaveCriticalSection hang on Hyperthreaded P4?

[talbotm]

We are experiencing a problem on a P4 3.06 with WinXP Pro SP2 that only occurs if hyperthreading is enabled. Our heavily multi-threaded application can hang for minutes, even hours. Debugging the hang reveals that two threads are stalled when releasing a critical section using leaveCriticalSection. The section itself is not owned by any thread, but the threads are not executing.

This behaviour is identical to that described in the google group posting

http://groups.google.ca/group/comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.win32/browse_thread/thread/b12f6ff2b0f75d68/774dd14f06cd0273?q=CRITICAL_SECTION+hyper+threading&rnum=4&hl=en#774dd14f06cd0273

The test application referenced in that thread also experiences the same problem. Note that another P4 with HTT (2.6GHz) and the same OS seems OK.

Has anyone heard of any similar issues, or have any recommendations on how to begin to avoid this behaviour?

Thanks!

[ClayB]

talbotm -

Have you tried updating the BIOS on the machine that is giving trouble? A few posters that had similar troubles have found this fixes the problem. If you don't think the problem is not the operating system (since the other platform doesn't have this glitch), you might try this, especially if the problem occurs with a different OS on the target system.

--clay