Useful for debugging.
Motivation: With SMP on x64 I found a number of instances where critical sections would be left abandoned, causing lockups. From what I can tell it was exceptions inside rpcrt4, which leave the process in a blocked state. Might or might not be related to x64 / SMP.
For real value, you still need to put checks at certain places manually, but this is not super straight forward, because there can be false positives, e.g. when a process is terminated due to an exception, where the abandoned lock is acceptable, and we have this during testing. It's difficult to 100% distinguish this from silent and very bad lock leaks.
Problematic code:
__try
{
SomeFunction(); // throws an exception with a CS held, e.g. heap code
}
__except(1)
{
DPRINT1("Oops. let's just pretend it's all ok!\n");
}