Abstract: A system and method for managing variable weight contexts in a multithreaded operating system. Each thread is allocated a standard thread state. In addition, each thread has an indicator of whether or not it has variable context in addition. The variable context indicator is used to access a flavor table that specifies the structure of the additional thread state information. The flavor table, in one embodiment, contains an indicator specifying whether the variable context data is to be saved and restored during a context switch. The standard thread state context is saved on a context and the variable context is saved only for those threads that use the context and only when the flavor table indicates that the variable context should be saved.