MS Word (Foreign language editions) / Splwow64 - Global Atoms starting with '-%D4'

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PEERNET Inc. _

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I'm not sure where to start with this one but on testing Word 32-bit (Danish) edition, if you print global atoms starting with '-%D4' are left behind and if you do many prints (batch printing) the atom table fills up over time.

It appears to be related to splwow64.exe in some way. If you run word first time and splwow64 gets created first time there appears to be no leaks but if you close word, wait for splwow64 to terminate, and the open word, reopen document and print it. You get a global atom leak.

I can see word is doing NTQueryInformationAtom on a atom number and it returns in info on '-%D4' atom but word did not create the atom from what I can tell.

I can see in splwow64 if also query by atom number using NTQueryInformationAtom and it get back the '-%D4'. You can see DeleteAtom on the atom number in splwow64 which leads me to think it's a splwow64 issue.

What I can't figure out is who creates these '-%D4' prefixed global atoms.

Is this a MS Office issue or it a splwow64 issue.

We first encountered this on windows 2016 but it appears to be an issue on all OSs.

On Windows 2016 able to see this issue in Word French 32-bit edition. We can see it in Word English 32bit as well but seems harder to get into this state.

I have to say this is a total misuse of the Global Atom table and it prone to bring the OS to a halt. Which for us it does eventually cause processes to stop being created and forces a reboot of the OS.

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