[nmcveity]

But sometimes not fast enough. IIRC, you can wait for a HPROCESS in Win32 with the WaitForSingleObject call but that is signaled when the application code finishes _not_ when the OS has finished it's clean up. So if the process you were waiting on was an application that would write, say, "a.txt" and you wanted to wait until that process was done so that you can read "a.txt", it is possible that you fail to open that file because the OS had not released the file resource.

Of course, I wouldn't put that clean up in an atexit.