WinForms application hang due to SystemEvents.OnUserPreferenceChanged event

Question

I\'ve been dealing with a strange application hang in my clients installations. After trying several things i reached the conclusion that without a dump it won\'t work. So I

Answer 1

Well, you have thee classic problem of control 'creation' on non UI thread.

• It may be you are creating the control.
• Access to some property creates a control underneath without you knowing (rare).
• Access to the Handle property before it is been created (may be indirectly).
• Fooled by InvokeRequired (ref 1), (ref 2).

Great read on the subject: (ref 1) (ref 2) and (ref 3).

I don't know of a way to find the control in a dump (tried myself) but you can try to set a breakpoint in code as described in (ref 4) and (ref 5).

Cheers.

Reference:

1. Mysterious Hang or The Great Deception of InvokeRequired

2. Control.Trifecta: InvokeRequired, IsHandleCreated, and IsDisposed

3. .NET 2.0 WinForms multithreading and a few long days

4. Debugging UI

5. The case of the leaking thread handles