I have a background thread running in my game, and my problem is it just vanishes after the first few seconds. I'm on a dual core windows XP machine.

class ThreadClass
{
protected:
	HANDLE  threadHandle;
	DWORD   threadID;

public:
	ThreadClass() : threadHandle(NULL), threadID(0) {	}
	virtual ~ThreadClass() { end(); }

	void begin()
	{
		if( threadHandle )
			end();  // just to be safe.

		// Start the thread.
		threadHandle = CreateThread( NULL,
			0,
			(LPTHREAD_START_ROUTINE)cThreadProc,
			this,
			0,
			(LPDWORD)&threadID );
		
		if( threadHandle == NULL )		{
			// Arrooga! Dive, dive!  And deal with the error, too!
		}

//		SetThreadPriority(threadHandle, THREAD_PRIORITY_LOWEST);
		SetThreadPriority(threadHandle, THREAD_PRIORITY_BELOW_NORMAL);
//		SetThreadPriority(threadHandle, THREAD_PRIORITY_NORMAL);
	}


	void end()
	{
		//----------a breakpoint here never gets called
		if( threadHandle != NULL )
		{
			WaitForSingleObject( threadHandle, INFINITE );
			CloseHandle( threadHandle );
			threadHandle = NULL;
		}
	}

	virtual DWORD threadProc() = 0;
};

static DWORD WINAPI cThreadProc( ThreadClass* pThis ) {
	return pThis->threadProc();
}

and then a basic class inherits from it :

class ThreadGrouper : public ThreadClass
{
//stuff here
public:
	virtual DWORD threadProc()
	{
		while(1)
		{
		//mainloop stuff
		}		
		//--------a breakpoint here never gets called
		return 0;
	}
}

The stuff in the while loop runs for a bit at startup, then its just gone and putting a breakpoint in gets nothing. the end() function never gets called, so I have no idea what is happening, or how to debug it. Could anyone point me in the right direction?

Ah thanks, I am still new to threading and never noticed that thread window before. It seems it deadlocked itself. I think I can fix it now, thanks.