Solved the problem with bjam going into an active wait state, hogging up processor resources, when waiting for one of its child processes to terminate while not all of its available child process slots are being used. To see this bug in action, try compiling a simple C++ program on a 2 processor PC with the -j 2 command-line option and watching how much processor resources bjam uses while linking. Was caused by treating unused process slots as used in the try_wait() function, causing the WaitForMultipleObjects() Windows API call to exit instantly with an error which was then getting incorrectly interpreted as a timeout, starting the whole cycle anew.