Can aborting a process without resetting the clipb

Question

I've got a program that calls SetClipboardViewer at startup to register for clipboard change notifications. At shutdown time, it will call ChangeClipboardChain to remove itself from the chain correctly.

This is all great as long as the program runs normally. But that's got me wondering, what happens if the program gets aborted, either by me killing it under the debugger, by a crash, or by the user killing the process because something went wrong? Then the cleanup never happens. Can that cause trouble for the system somehow?

Specifically, I know Windows can remove my viewer without trouble because it's a handle and Windows can clean up all handles when a process terminates, but will this cause the next value downstream in the chain, that I was holding a reference to, to get lost somehow?

Answer 1

Yes, failure to remove yourself from the chain will break the chain. Deadly sin #2. Please read the whole list to be sure that you're following all of the rules. http://www.clipboardextender.com/developing-clipboard-aware-programs-for-windows/6 Lots of apps suffer from this, including the Delphi IDE. i.e. if Delphi crashes in certain ways, it'll kill the clipboard chain (D2005 anyway).

Consider using Vista style notification on Vista/Windows7.