Process Launched with CreateProcess() May Terminate Prematurely

Cmd.exe, Perl.exe, or other console-mode applications may fail to initialize properly and terminate prematurely when launched by a service using the CreateProcess() or CreateProcessAsUser() APIs. The calling process has no way of knowing that the launched console-mode application has terminated prematurely.

In some instances, calling GetExitCode() against the failed process indicates the following exit code: In multithreaded applications, the premature termination causes desktop heap leaks. Over time the desktop heap is exhausted, which results in User32.dll or Kernel32.dll initialization errors.

To resolve this problem, please see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base for more information: