Killing Processes

[AvalancheCCM]

My Windows XP Pro machine had several programs hang (Firefox, Internet
Explorer and Excel). They all showed as "Not Responding" in the Task
Manager and I tried to end the processes. I tried doing by clicking on
"end task" and I tried killing the programs by right clicking on the
process under the "processes tab" and ending the process. I even tried
running taskkill with the force option but to no avail.

Why doesn't Windows just kill the process? I have a Linux server that I
use on the side, and one thing I really like about it is that when a
process crashes, I can kill the process easily without restarting the
machine. Is there a way to get Windows to just kill the process like
Linux does? If I can, how do I do that? And if there's no way, why is
this so? (I guess Microsoft would want to prevent data corruption or
something, but the only way to kill the processes is to either
physically turn off the machine or to try restarting which often
doesn't work as the shutdown process gets hung by the renegade
processes).


Thanks!

 

[Galen]

In (e-mail address removed) <[email protected]> had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:

My Windows XP Pro machine had several programs hang (Firefox, Internet
Explorer and Excel). They all showed as "Not Responding" in the Task
Manager and I tried to end the processes. I tried doing by clicking on
"end task" and I tried killing the programs by right clicking on the
process under the "processes tab" and ending the process. I even tried
running taskkill with the force option but to no avail.

Why doesn't Windows just kill the process? I have a Linux server that
I use on the side, and one thing I really like about it is that when a
process crashes, I can kill the process easily without restarting the
machine. Is there a way to get Windows to just kill the process like
Linux does? If I can, how do I do that? And if there's no way, why is
this so? (I guess Microsoft would want to prevent data corruption or
something, but the only way to kill the processes is to either
physically turn off the machine or to try restarting which often
doesn't work as the shutdown process gets hung by the renegade
processes).


Thanks!

There are a number of ways to automatically end programs which aren't
responding. "Tweak" applications seem to be the best for their GUI for this
and most (if not all) have this setting and have settings to unload DLLs
from memory. The problem is that this isn't the problem. The problem, I
think, is why are they not responding? Malware of some type? Inappropriate
allocation of system resources? Applications running with elevated
priorities? I'd start there long before I was checking about unloading
un-responsive applications but that's just my thoughts on the subject.

Galen