Taskkill f doesn t kill a process

Question

When I start up an Experimental instance of VS from VS for debugging and stop debugging  sometimes directly from the parent VS   a zombile devenv exe process remains running which I am unable to kill  It holds on to many of my dlls   As I am logged onto this 64bit Win7 machine as Administrator  I would expect to be able to kill any process I wish to   I tried  from Administrator command prompt    End Task from Task Manager  TASKKILL  F  IM devenv exe PSKILL devenv exe   None return any error and TASKKILL and PSKILL returned success messages of terminating killing the process  But devenv exe still runs  it is not re-spawned as the PID remains constant  It goes away only on restart of the system which is not a great solution   Note  LockHunter shows devenv has got a lock on itself  And it cannot unlock it     The above screenshot is the output of Process Monitor showing devenv to be in some kind of  Process Profiling  loop  Right click on it and click open image in new tab to see it properly    Any ideas how to kill such a process on Windows

User · Answer

Reboot is the only solution that worked for me (so far).

The ever excellent Mark Russonovich has a good explanation for unkillable processes.

To summarise, it's quite possible it is due to unprocessed I/O requests that hasn't been handled properly (by a device driver your program has possibly accessed)

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-blog-archive/unkillable-processes/ba-p/723389

User · Answer

Some of the Exe files Dependents on Some services    So you need find the respective service and stop first

User · Answer

I know it s late but taskkill  im devenv exe  t  f should work  the  t kills child processes too

User · Answer

you must kill child process too if any spawned to kill successfully your process  taskkill  IM  process name   T  F   T   kills child process   F   forceful termination of your process

User · Answer

In my case  after several days of fighting with this problem  it was happening to VirtualBox and   Torrent processes   I discovered it was caused by a network driver issue  provoked by Windows Update patch KB4338818  Windows 7 x64   After uninstalling that patch everything went back to normal  I just thought it could be useful for others

User · Answer

For me  the way it worked is I have to kill the parent process  Figure the parent process out and kill it  taskkill  IM  parent process name exe   T  F

User · Answer

Run CMD as Admin will fix the problem

User · Answer

I ve seen this a few times and my only solution was a re-boot   You could try using PowerShell  Get-Process  devenv   kill  But if the other methods failed  this probably will too   -

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I was getting the following results with taskkill   gt taskkill  im  MyApp exe   t  f ERROR  The process with PID 32040  child process of PID 54176  could not be terminated  Reason  There is no running instance of the task    gt taskkill  pid 54176   t  f ERROR  The process  54176  not found    What worked for me was sysinternal s pskill   gt pskill exe -t 32040  PsKill v1 15 - Terminates processes on local or remote systems Copyright  C  1999-2012  Mark Russinovich Sysinternals - www sysinternals com  Process 32040 killed    You can get pskill from the sysinternal s live site

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I did the following  on an elevated powershell   PS C  Windows system32 gt  wmic exe  interactive off process where  name like   java     call terminate   command Output   Executing    SRV ROOT CIMV2 Win32 Process Handle  3064  - gt terminate   Method execution successful    Out Parameters   instance of   PARAMETERS  ReturnValue   0       I got some syntax information on   https   community spiceworks com topic 871561-wmic-error-like-invalid-alias-verb

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I could solve my issue rearding this problem by killing explorer exe which in turn was addicted to the process I wanted to kill  I guess this may also happen if processes open interfaces via hook which may be locked

User · Answer

Just had the same issue on Windows Server 2008 R2 and nothing helped  not taskmanager or taskkill  But  windows powershell run as administrator worked with  kill -id pid

User · Answer

Running as an admin works for me   1 search cmd in windows  2 right click on cmd select as  Run as administrator   3 netstat -ano   findstr  8080  4 taskkill pid  your number   F

User · Answer

Native tskill  lt pid gt   or tskill exe  lt pid gt    worked for me on Windows 10 where no other native answer did   In my case  I had some chrome exe processes for which task manager s  End Task  was working  but neither taskkill  F  T  PID  lt pid gt  nor powershell s kill -id  lt pid gt  worked  even with both shells run as admin    This is very strange as taskkill is purported to be a better-api-and-does-more version of tskill   In my case to kill all instances of a certain task I used FOR  F  usebackq tokens 2 skip 2   i IN   TASKLIST  FI  IMAGENAME eq name of task exe    DO tskill  i

User · Answer

I had the exact same issue  found this fix on another site  powershell exe  Get-Process processname  Stop-Process  it worked for me and I was in the same boat where I had to restart  the  T would not work

User · Answer

If taskkill  F  T  PID  lt pid gt  does not work  Try opening your terminal elevated using Run as Administrator  Search cmd in your windows menu  and right click Run as Administrator  then run the command again  This worked for me

User · Answer

If you download the free sysinternals suite  it has a pskill exe application which works well for these types of tasks  pskill exe  process name  It works on these processes even without using its -t option

User · Answer

I had the same problem and as many others here have said none of the normal Kill commands worked   My problem file was an executable that was being run from a network share by a user on a Remote Desktop Server   With multiple shared users not an easy thing to restart in during a work day   Even when the user logged off the exe was still listed in Task Manager   I sent to the server where the folder was shared and from Computer Management -  Sessions found the user with the session still open from that RDP server even though he was logged off   Right Click -  Close Session and the file lock was released   Beats me why I couldn t end the taks   The error message I was originally getting when I try and delete the file was  The action can t be completed because the file is open in System   Hope this helps someone else

User · Answer

I faced the same issue where I started a node app in port 3000 and it didn t close correctly and the process kept running even after restart   None of the taskkill or powershell commands running in Administrator mode worked for me   I used MS Process Expoler   Properties   Image   Current directory  which was supposed to be the my project directory    Finally  I had to reboot in SafeMode and rename the project folder and restart  The Node processes which were consuming port 3000 killed itself

User · Answer

open task manager select services tab select the process  devenv exe   you want to kill and click services button right on the process  select properties and disable it

User · Answer

NirSoft s NirCmd did the job for me   nircmd killprocess  process name exe    killprocess man page is here

User · Answer

In my case none of the solutions here worked  I eventually found that the program in question was frozen trying to poll USB audio interfaces  So I unplugged a USB DAC I had connected  and to my surprise the application quit instantly  Francis  answer mentions that it could be a result of  unprocessed I O requests that hasn t been handled properly  by a device driver your program has possibly accessed    which might explain why this fixed it   I suppose it really depends on what the program was doing when it froze  but if none of the other solutions are working  try disconnecting all USB devices to see if one of them could be the cause

User · Answer

I have the Problem with debugged processes with gdb in Code  Blocks  As soon it is hanging while accidentally stepping into instructions out of scope of your sources  as libs without sources or system functions  you cannot quit the debugging neither from Code  Blocks nor from Task-Manager   I think it is an error in the implementation of gdb in Code  Blocks  but could also be in gdb     My Solution   taskkill  F  IM process exe  T  This shows the PID of the parent process  Now kill the parent   taskkill  PID yyyy  Both are gone   Done

User · Answer

I am going to suggest something here because I recently faced the same issue and I tried every possible thing in the answers but nothing worked  I was getting errors like      ERROR  The process with PID 23908 could not be terminated    Reason  There is no running instance of the task    using command prompt  Power shell wasn t helpful either  it would simply execute the commands and no response with process still running    Until I decided to delete the associated   exe  file  Since the file was active  windows would not allow the deletion  but in that warning window it gave me the name of the process which was holding up the task I wanted to kill   I was able to kill the original task and thus the buggy process   It is definitely worth a try if none of the solutions works out

User · Answer

The same problem happened to me in VirtualBox with respect to Java processes   In my case  it was due to a bug in Windows Update patch KB4338818  Windows 7 x64    I solved it by doing the following    Uninstall Windows Update patch KB4338818   Install Windows Update patch KB4338821

User · Answer

The taskkill and powershell  kill  methods didn t work for me  it still said  Access Denied    I had better luck with this   wmic process where  name  myprocessname exe   delete

User · Answer

As Francis mentioned some process can not be terminated because of       unprocessed I O requests    In my experience i was dealing with buggy graphic driver that would cause my game to crash and not be able to close it  as last resort i disabled the graphic driver and the process finally went away   If your application is waiting for a resource from driver like wifi or graphic try disabling them in device manager  you need to dig a little deep to see where they hanged   This is of course not recommended but sometimes you have nothing to lose anymore

[windows] Taskkill /f doesn't kill a process

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