Errors in Handling Cleanup and Close Operations

Some drivers fail to distinguish the tasks required in DispatchCleanup and DispatchClose routines. The I/O manager calls a driver's DispatchCleanup routine when the last handle to a file object is closed. The DispatchClose routine is called when the last reference is released from the file object. A driver should not attempt to free resources in its DispatchCleanup routine that are attached to a file object or might be used by other DispatchXxx routines.

When calling dispatch routines, the I/O manager holds a reference to the file object for normal I/O calls. As a result, a driver can receive I/O requests for a file object after its DispatchCleanup routine has been called but before its DispatchClose routine is called. For example, a user-mode caller might close the file handle while an I/O manager request is in progress from another thread. If the driver has deleted or freed necessary resources before the I/O manager calls its DispatchClose routine, invalid pointer references and other problems could occur.