Yes, a single-threaded application can come to a standstill if you have locks that are not repeaters, and the thread tries to restore the lock that it already owns (for example, through a recursive call).
Edit : I see that the message has been marked as "Java"; I don’t know if this update was or if I missed it earlier, but in any case it blocks Java ARE re-entry, so you can not slow down a single-threaded application in this way.