Sending a window a WM_DESTROY message is like prank calling somebody pretending to be the police

A customer was trying to track down a memory leak in their program. Their leak tracking tool produced the stacks which allocated memory that was never freed, and they all seemed to come from uxtheme.dll, which is a DLL that comes with Windows. The customer naturally contacted Microsoft to report what appeared to be a memory leak in Windows.

I was one of the people who investigated this case, and the customer was able to narrow down the scenario which was triggering the leak. Eventually, I tracked it down. First, here's the thread that caused the leak:

DWORD CALLBACK ThreadProc(void *lpParameter)
{
 ...
 // This CreateWindow caused uxtheme to allocate some memory
 HWND hwnd = CreateWindow(...);
 RememberWorkerWindow(hwnd);
 MSG msg;
 while (GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0)) {
  TranslateMessage(&msg);
  DispatchMessage(&msg);
 }
 return 0;
}

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