If terminating a hung thread is a good idea, how do I do it safely?

Posted by Steve on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Steve
Published on 2010-04-04T21:09:32Z Indexed on 2010/04/05 4:33 UTC
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Filed under:

outlook

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delphi

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best-practices

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threads

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automation

My Delphi program relies heavily on Outlook automation. Outlook versions prior to 2007-SP2 tend to get stuck in memory due to badly written addins and badly written Outlook code.

If Outlook is stuck, calling CreateOleObject('Outlook.Application') or GetActiveObject ... doesn't return and keeps my application hanging till Outlook.exe is closed in the task manager.

I've thought of a solution, but I'm unsure whether it's good practice or not.

I'd start Outlook with CreateOleObject in a separate thread, wait 10 seconds in my main thread and if Outlook hangs (CreateOleObject doesn't return), offer the user to kill the Outlook.exe process from my program.

But since I don't want to force the user to kill the Outlook.exe process, as an alternative I also need a way to kill the new thread in my program which keeps hanging now.

Is this good practice?
How can I terminate a hanging thread in Delphi without leaking memory?

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