Regarding Zombies in Windows

[RenataTostada]

Hello, I am looking to implement zombie detection into my company's product--well, to be more accurate, I already have. However, despite everything seeming on the up-and-up in terms of handle management, we have traced some application lockups to my implementation, without any concrete idea as to why. These applications are not associated with our product in any direct way--it's processes like Windows Explorer and Microsoft Outlook.

Since this is the only place where I have been able to find discussion of--let alone implementation--of such detection in Windows, I wanted to ask if this was something that the author or other users of ObjectExplorer have encountered themselves? I'm curious as to whether the implementation of iterating over each process handle on the system and creating a duplicate of it could cause an application to become unresponsive.

In the author's article discussing zombies on Windows, there is an implication that there may be more ways to identify zombies. What would another implementation look like? Is it possible, in C++, to do something similar to what the kernel debugger does, wherein instead of waiting on a handle for 0ms, we can see its handle table and handle count to check if they are 0? To be clear, I'm not looking for fully written and fleshed out code or even pseudocode. I'm simply hoping that I can be pointed in the right direction in terms of finding a different implementation that is less hands-on, as it were, with other processes' handles.

I'm thankful for any help here.