Soooo many handles to remember to free in the right order, even before you got into OLE/COM. It was a lot of fun to come up with your own C++ wrappers to put them under RAII -- and this was before "smart pointers." You sort of had to iterate on a few versions of that, trying out mechanisms to scope sharing, to understand why MFC was the way it was.

Fond memories of the #winprog IRC channel. Discussions there, theForger's tutorial, and Charles Petzold's books got me going on Startup Control Panel and the like.

https://web.archive.org/web/20131106030702/http://www.mlin.n...

Oh man, I remember fighting with handle leaks back then too - that stuff was a rite of passage.