Tess has a great blog! She is an escalation engineer for ASP.NET and having worked with some of the PSS guys in the past – I can tell you – they see the really dark sides of .NET every day…but also a great way to get a better understanding of the internals.

Tess’ newest post talks about how the new background exception behaviour in 2.0 can bring down the whole worker process. Recommended reading.

The moral of the story: Be very careful to handle all errors in non-ASP.NET controlled threads – and this includes Finalizers – otherwise your process may just shut down…