Control structures for chemical processes with recycle streams are often affected by the so-called "snowball effect", which consists in very large variations of the manipulated variables required to reject relatively small disturbances. This occurrence is related to a wrong choice of the control structure, which may be relatively easy to detect for simple systems, but is difficult to discover for complex ones. A systematic steady state analysis has been developed for systems with recycle, which is able to classify all possible control configurations which are and which are not affected by snowballing.