Conclusion

We called the owner of the Dragon and let him know what we had found. We explained the deadlock condition to him. Since we didn't know anything about the processes involved, we asked if these were critical processes that could render the whole system useless. Sure enough, they were!

We prepared a full report for the customer. He then forwarded this to the software vendor who was designing and writing their application.

A month later, we checked in with the customer again, just to see how things were going. Sure enough, they agreed that the hang was caused by the new software, and the problem was being addressed by the programmers.

At the beginning of this case history, we clearly pointed out that problems didn't start on the Dragon until new software was installed. However, that may have just been a coincidence . Performing an analysis of the system crash dump, we were able to confirm that the new software was causing problems and to discover why the Dragon had fallen asleep on the job.