Why does the BackgroundWorker not call the RunWorkerCompleted on the right thread in this unit test?

The behavior is different dues to the different contexts that you are running under.

When you call bw.RunWorkerAsync(), the SynchronizationContext is captured. This is used to dispatch out the RunWorkerCompleted call.

Under WPF it will use DispatcherSynchronizationContext which will marshall the completed call back to the UI thread. Under the test, this marshalling is unnecessary so it remains on the background worker thread.

I belive that the calling thread must support messagepumping (mean, being STA apartment and having an associated Dispatcher) so the background worker can post the callback. If it does not, the background worker has no option but execute the callback in its own thread. If you want to test it, see this link.