Raymond Chen has a pretty good blog post on this: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2010/08/27/10054832.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/arch

Raymond Chen has a pretty good blog post on this: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2010/08/27/10054832.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2010/08/27/10054... Basically, Win32 wants all threads to die out before the process exits, but the C runtime will exit out the process for you when your "main" thread dies.