Microsoft® Windows® Internals: Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000, 4th Edition

Flow of CreateProcess

So far in this chapter, you've seen the structures that are part of a process and the API functions with which you (and the operating system) can manipulate processes. You've also found out how you can use tools to view how processes interact with your system. But how did those processes come into being, and how do they exit once they've fulfilled their purpose? In the following sections, you'll discover how a Windows process comes to life.

A Windows process is created when an application calls one of the process creation functions, such as CreateProcess, CreateProcessAsUser, CreateProcessWithTokenW, or CreateProcessWithLogonW. Creating a Windows process consists of several stages carried out in three parts of the operating ...