Sigh. That's obnoxious - yet another example of software patents confusing proving that an idea is commercially valuable with inventing it in the first place. Anyone with the requisite skills in reverse engineering, compilers, etc. could have told you that hot patching functions in memory is possible and would take at most a few minutes to notice that this may be unsafe if some suspended thread is sitting in a function prolog. Yet "identifying a portion of executable code to be updated in a running computer program; and determining whether it is safe to modify the executable code of the running computer program without having to restart the running computer program" (an actual claim, not the abstract or title quotes that people tend to misconstrue) is now locked out for the next decade or so.