Yeah, the GDI is pretty horrible. But in Microsoft's defense, those decisions were made almost 20 years ago for NT4, when prevailing views on security and stabi

Yeah, the GDI is pretty horrible. But in Microsoft's defense, those decisions were made almost 20 years ago for NT4, when prevailing views on security and stability were very different from today. The post DX10 graphics pipeline doesn't do things like this, and is really quite sane and robust. Unfortunately, you need Vista+ for DX10, and even then you still get saddled with the local GDI attack surface.