Windows Hooks

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I wrote a system hook dll that monitors windows messages in another application. Everything works except it takes a long time for the hook dll to go away after my application exited. This is annoying because I can not build my projects as often. I noticed that the hook dll is injected to more than 30 applications on my XP windows. The first 10 plus applications release the hook dll as soon as my application exited. But the rest of the applications release the hook dll at 5-10 minutes later.

My question is: is there a way to speed up the unloading of the hook dll after calling UnhookWindowsHookEx()? or is there a way to write a system hook dll that only injects into a particular application that I am interested?

Thanks

Posted 2-Sep-10 7:43am

Junlin Xu

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«_Superman_» · Answer 1 · 2010-09-02T18:20:00

There must be something in your code that is holding up the DLL.
You could try to comment out all code in the hook callback and check if this happens.

Using SetWindowsHookEx you can either hook into the current process or all processes. You need other techniques to only hook into selected processes.

Here are some good articles on hooking -
Three Ways to Inject Your Code into Another Process[^]
API Hooking Revealed[^]
A More Complete DLL Injection Solution Using CreateRemoteThread[^]