Why does my computer freeze when the main UI thread is frozen?

Question

I saw a lot of posts about why not using Backgroundworkers makes the user interface freeze, and I understand that. But how is it that I cannot move my cursor for a few seconds? I'm not sure what a stream is or how it works, but, of course, the workload of one does not affect the responsiveness of the other. And of course, the Windows 7 cursor does not start in the same thread as my program (4237 or so). Is there a complicated, viable reason for this, or is it just that my computer is falling apart?

Answer 1

A process is an instance of a program running on a CPU (a process can consist of one or more threads). If the thread processes the CPU, other processes will starve. That is, they will not be allocated enough processor time to complete. Themes are an interesting topic. For more information, find Wikipedia for: threads, processes, hunger, or deadlocks. If you want to know more, grab a book on operating system concepts. I found operating systems with the concepts of Abraham Silbershats particularly useful (readily available in pdf format).