Killing CSRSS.exe kills vista!

[theinvisibleGhost]

This morning I was having issues with Internet Explorer,
and in Taskmanager requested to be taken to the process
causing the problem. I know that should be Iexplore.exe but for
some reason it instead went to CSRSS.exe.

Out of frustration I clicked End Process.
I was then shocked to see Vista Blue Screen.

I restarted the machine, and tried the same thing... and it done it
again.
I went up to my XP box and tried on that machine, no can do
CSRSS.exe is a critical process fair enough!
This system's fully up to date with patches as far as I know.

 

[Richard Urban]

Thanks for the information. I now know better and will not kill that
process..

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Dale M. White]

Back in the NT4 days,we we're looking for a way to cause a BSOD because we
wanted to test certain recovery features and such in a cluster environment.
One of the guys found that Killing the CSRSS was a great way to create a
BSOD.

I think it also worked in Win2000, but MS protected it in XP and Win2003.
Nice to see it's back to crashing in Vista.

In short, I would say this is expected behavior.

 

[Dave Horne]

So how did you manage to get back into Vista after this?

 

[Dale White]

Killing it, just causes a BSOD, system reboots and you are back to runnning

 

[Dave Horne]

Dale, thanks. I realized that when I went back and reread the initial post.
(I access this forum from a newsreader and couldn't go back and delete my
post once I realized that.)

 

[Dave Wood [MS]]

Yes, you can now kill any process with Task Manager, even the ones that will
bring down your machine. At one point Task Manager prevented you from
killing processes like this, but then spyware started giving their processes
the same names to make themselves harder to kill ...

Dave

 

[Dale White]

And I think that was something that should have always been there or make
the "Kill" command work that way.

I understand protecting the user from the user, but at some point has an
Admin, I should get absolute power over killing a process.

So glad it's back

 

[Dave Wood [MS]]

Yes, you can now kill any process with Task Manager, even the ones that will
bring down your machine. At one point Task Manager prevented you from
killing processes like this, but then spyware started giving their processes
the same names to make themselves harder to kill ...

Dave