Really killing a process in Windows

Question

Occasionally a program on a Windows machine goes crazy and just hangs   So I ll call up the task manager and hit the  End Process  button for it   However  this doesn t always work  if I try it enough times then it ll usually die eventually  but I d really like to be able to just kill it immediately   On Linux I could just kill -9 to guarantee that a process will die   This also could be used for writing batch scripts and writing batch scripts is programming   Is there some program or command that comes with Windows that will always kill a process   A free third-party app would be fine  although I d prefer to be able to do this on machines I sit down at for the first time

User · Answer

setup an AT command to run task manager or process explorer as SYSTEM.

AT 12:34 /interactive "C:/procexp.exe"

If process explorer was in your root C drive then this would open it as SYSTEM and you could kill any process without getting any access denied errors. Set this for like a minute in the future, then it will pop up for you.

User · Answer

When ntsd access is denied  try   ZeroWave was designed to be a simple tool that will provide a multilevel termination of any kind of process   ZeroWave is also a easy-to-use program due to its simple installation and its very friendly graphical interface   ZeroWave has three termination modes and with the  INSANE  mode can terminate any kind of process that can run on Windows   It seems that ZeroWave can t kill avp exe

User · Answer

JosepStyons is right  Open cmd exe and run  taskkill  im processname exe  f   If there is an error saying      ERROR  The process  process exe  with PID 1234 could not be   terminated        Reason  Access is denied    then try running cmd exe as administrator

User · Answer

End Process  on the Processes-Tab calls TerminateProcess which is the most ultimate way Windows knows to kill a process   If it doesn t go away  it s currently locked waiting on some kernel resource  probably a buggy driver  and there is nothing  short of a reboot  you could do to make the process go away   Have a look at this blog-entry from wayback when  http   blogs technet com markrussinovich archive 2005 08 17 unkillable-processes aspx  Unix based systems like Linux also have that problem where processes could survive a kill -9 if they are in what s known as  Uninterruptible sleep   shown by top and ps as state D  at which point the processes sleep so well that they can t process incoming signals  which is what kill does - sending signals    Normally  Uninterruptible sleep should not last long  but as under Windows  broken drivers or broken userpace programs  vfork without exec  can end up sleeping in D forever

User · Answer

taskkill  im myprocess exe  f   The   f  is for  force   If you know the PID  then you can specify that  as in   taskkill  pid 1234  f   Lots of other options are possible  just type taskkill    for all of them   The   t  option kills a process and any child processes  that may be useful to you

User · Answer

Get process explorer from sysinternals  now Microsoft   Process Explorer - Windows Sysinternals   Microsoft Docs

User · Answer

One trick that works well is to attach a debugger and then quit the debugger   On XP or Windows 2003 you can do this using ntsd that ships out of the box   ntsd -pn myapp exe   ntsd will open up a new window   Just type  q  in the window to quit the debugger and take out the process   I ve known this to work even when task manager doesn t seem able to kill a process   Unfortunately ntsd was removed from Vista and you have to install the  free  debbugging tools for windows to get a suitable debugger

User · Answer

Process Hacker has numerous ways of killing a process      Right-click the process  then go to Miscellaneous- Terminator

User · Answer

FYI you can sometimes use SYSTEM or Trustedinstaller to kill tasks     google quickkill 3 0 bat  sc config TrustedInstaller binPath   cmd  c TASKKILL  F   IM notepad exe sc start  TrustedInstaller

[windows] Really killing a process in Windows

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