Checking if a console process is alive

I have a console application running on a NT workstation.
It spawns off one or more instances of a child program using CreateProcess. It retains each child's Process ID and periodically checks if the children are alive or not, using OpenProcess.

The OpenProcess sometimes returns a NULL handle even if the child process is alive. This seems to happen when the NT server is really really busy - the child processes do some heavy number crunching.

Any suggestions ?


int main( int argc, char *argv[] )
{
   ...

   STARTUPINFO si =
   {  
      sizeof(STARTUPINFO), NULL, NULL, NULL, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0, STARTF_USESHOWWINDOW, SW_SHOWNORMAL, 0, NULL, 0, 0, 0
   };
   PROCESS_INFORMATION pi;
   if ( !CreateProcess(NULL, (char *)aCommand.data(), NULL, NULL, FALSE, CREATE_NEW_CONSOLE, NULL, NULL, &si, &pi) )
      cout << "Failed to start Child Process, CreateProcess returned " << GetLastError() << endl;
   else
      cout << "Child Process ID is " << pi.dwProcessId << endl;
   }
}

bool isActive( DWORD ProcessID )
{
   //Get handle to process
   HANDLE handle = OpenProcess( PROCESS_QUERY_INFORMATION, FALSE, ProcessID );
   if ( handle != NULL )
   {
      DWORD Value;
      if ( GetExitCodeProcess( handle, &Value ) && ( Value == (DWORD)STILL_ACTIVE ) )
         return true;
   }

   return false;
}