When a thread abandons a mutex, the exception is thrown in the next thread that acquires the mutex. The thread might acquire the mutex because it was already waiting on the mutex or because it enters the mutex at a later time.

An abandoned mutex indicates a serious programming error. When a thread exits without releasing the mutex, the data structures protected by the mutex might not be in a consistent state. Prior to version 2.0 of the .NET Framework, such problems were hard to discover because no exception was thrown if a wait completed as the result of an abandoned mutex. For more information, see the System.Threading.Mutex class.

The next thread to request ownership of the mutex can handle this exception and proceed, provided that the integrity of the data structures can be verified.