Unable to end processes (is there a windows "kill -9" ?)

[Jesse]

I was using Firefox, and it hung. So I went to Task Manager, where it was
listed as "not responding". I clicked "End Task". The windows
error-reporting dialog came up, and asked if I wanted to submit an error
report. I did. But Firefox is still there! So I switched to the Processes
tab, and clicked End Process. Nothing happened.

The rest of the system appears to be running normally (for now), but I can't
get the Firefox window to go away. The window itself is still responsive: I
can move it, resize it (though it won't redraw), even minimize it. But I
can't make the application go away.

What do I do? This has happened recently with other apps, too.

I'm running Win XP Pro SP2, fully patched. CPU utilization is 3%. 477MB
physical memory available.

Thanks!

--

 

[Guest]

Go to run,type:services.msc In msc scroll to the application,double click,
in properties,select to disable,end running service,close out msc.

 

[Robert Moir]

I was using Firefox, and it hung. So I went to Task Manager, where it
was listed as "not responding". I clicked "End Task". The windows
error-reporting dialog came up, and asked if I wanted to submit an
error report. I did. But Firefox is still there! So I switched to the
Processes tab, and clicked End Process. Nothing happened.

The rest of the system appears to be running normally (for now), but
I can't get the Firefox window to go away. The window itself is still
responsive: I can move it, resize it (though it won't redraw), even
minimize it. But I can't make the application go away.

What do I do? This has happened recently with other apps, too.

I'm running Win XP Pro SP2, fully patched. CPU utilization is 3%.
477MB physical memory available.

Try the 'taskkill' command. As ever, you can do a 'taskkill /?' for the man
page,
but 'taskkill /f /pid 1234' will perform the windows version of kill -9 on
the process
with a pid of 1234.


--
--
Rob Moir, Microsoft MVP
Blog Site - http://www.robertmoir.com
Virtual PC 2004 FAQ - http://www.robertmoir.co.uk/win/VirtualPC2004FAQ.html
I'm always surprised at "professionals" who STILL have to be asked "Have you
checked (event viewer / syslog)".

 

[Robert Moir]

Go to run,type:services.msc In msc scroll to the application,double
click, in properties,select to disable,end running service,close out
msc.

Services.msc is not a list of running applications. It is a list of
services, which is not the same thing at all.

If something has installed FireFox as a service on your computer then
killing the currently running instance of it is very likely the least of
your problems.


--
--
Rob Moir, Microsoft MVP
Blog Site - http://www.robertmoir.com
Virtual PC 2004 FAQ - http://www.robertmoir.co.uk/win/VirtualPC2004FAQ.html
I'm always surprised at "professionals" who STILL have to be asked "Have you
checked (event viewer / syslog)".

 

[Jesse]

Thanks Rob! Here's an interesting side-note: it turned out that the problem
wasn't just Firefox. While I could exit other applications (e.g., Outlook,
Word, VisualStudio), and they disappeared from the running applications
list, they remained on the process list. So Outlook looked like it was gone,
but its process was still running -- and using the "End Process" button had
no effect.

Ultimately, I had to restart -- but a soft restart wouldn't work, presumably
because the system was waiting for all those processes to end, but they
never did. I had to power off the machine to get it to shut down.

Any idea what might cause this kind of thing?

 

[Robert Moir]

Thanks Rob! Here's an interesting side-note: it turned out that the
problem wasn't just Firefox. While I could exit other applications
(e.g., Outlook, Word, VisualStudio), and they disappeared from the
running applications list, they remained on the process list. So
Outlook looked like it was gone, but its process was still running --
and using the "End Process" button had no effect.

Ultimately, I had to restart -- but a soft restart wouldn't work,
presumably because the system was waiting for all those processes to
end, but they never did. I had to power off the machine to get it to
shut down.
Any idea what might cause this kind of thing?

Off the top of my head, not really. I've seen things like this happen before
and I'd say something at a low level was stalled that they were all waiting
on, but even if I'm totally accurate there, we've just waved our hands
around and not actually got any further forward.

Made any recent changes?