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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T09:29:39+00:00

I’m having trouble performing a search operation in the background, and displaying the results

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I’m having trouble performing a search operation in the background, and displaying the results to the user in the foreground inside a list box.

The program uses SendMessage to send the query results back to the GUI.

When the program is closed, the GUI marks a global (volatile) variable as “completed”, and uses MsgWaitForMultipleObjects to wait on the thread handle, to join the thread.

When I break the program, I see a deadlock: the GUI is waiting for the background thread to terminate, whereas the background thread is waiting in SendMessage.

This deadlock still occurs when I use a 100-ms timeout for MsgWaitForMultipleObjects and call it inside a loop, with QS_ALLINPUT. I can’t figure out why.

Is this design even correct? Is there a better way to wait for the thread to terminate?
If not, what is the issue?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You need a double-buffering scheme to avoid overrunning the message queue. Lay it out like this:

    Thread 1 performs the search and uses PostMessage to send results.

    Thread 2 reads the message queue, selectively removes search result messages, and stores them in an internal memory-based queue that can handle any number of entries.

    Thread 3 reads results from the internal queue and displays them.

    Note that you’ll need a get/put API for the queue with mutex protection to prevent threads 2 and 3 from stepping on each other.

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