tracing adds to the startup of the vm, if a user presses ctrl-c during that initialization, the signal dispatcher thread and the ctrl-break handler is not yet setup.

On windows, this asserts on debug builds:

# To suppress the following error report, specify this argument
# after -XX: or in .hotspotrc: SuppressErrorAt=\os_windows.cpp:1963
#
# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:
#
# Internal Error (..\..\src\os\windows\vm\os_windows.cpp:1963), pid=612, tid=35
76
# assert(ret != 0) failed: ReleaseSemaphore() failed
#
# JRE version: Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (7.0_14) (build 1.7.0_14-ea-n
ightly-h3022-20130125-b01-b00)
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (24.0-b32-internal-debug mixed mode window
s-x86 )
# Failed to write core dump. Minidumps are not enabled by default on client vers
ions of Windows
#
# An error report file with more information is saved as:
# D:\temp\SPECjbb2005_kitv1.07\SPECjbb2005\hs_err_pid612.log
#
# If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit:
# http://bugreport.sun.com/bugreport/crash.jsp
#

The ReleaseSemaphore is performed on an non-initialized global Handle, this causes the assert to trap