skype - Unable to kill Windows 7 Processes
2014-02
Duncan Krebs
Possible Duplicate:
Cannot end Windows 7 process, even tried pskill
I have always been a fan of Windows but lately on multiple occasions including skype32.exe and Microsoft Lync I have been unable to kill these processes using task manager all the command line tips I have read in other posts and no luck.
This is more principle than anything else how can it be that as a user I can't be able to kill a process, is this a bug in Windows or the apps I'm running. I would think Windows would have full control over killing a process. any help would be appreciated, it tends to happen more often than not with Skype.exe.
surfasb
There are numerous ways of preventing process killing. Most of them have to do with rootkits - that is under normal conditions you should be able to kill every process (apart from the system ones which are absolutely necessary) but in case when you are infected with some virus which includes a rootkit component this might prove more of a challenge than anything else. But in the same sense there are numerous ways of killing a process but most of them require some sort of programming tinkering. As a suggestion I'd say to try Process Explorer which is a lot powerful than task manager
Moab
Download PS tools, copy "pskill" to the System32 folder.
then use the command line to kill the process.
pskill 1680
1680 represents the process ID (PID) of the process you are trying to terminate, which can be found using task manager.
If pskill does not work, see this method
Chris W. Rea
Try Process Hacker, as described at my other answer here.
I found Process Hacker is able to kill privileged / protected processes that neither of Task Manager nor Process Explorer could properly "take care of" . :-)
One of Process Hacker's advertised features is "Powerful process termination that bypasses security software and rootkits."
Néstor Sánchez A.
Right now I'm trying to Run/Debug my application in Visual Studio, but it cannot create it because the last instance of the app.vshost.exe is still running. Then, by using the Task Manager I'm trying to kill it, but it just remains there with no signal of activity.
Beyond that particular case (maybe a Visual Studio bug), I'm very curious about the technical reasons why sometimes Windows cannot kill a process?
Can, an enlighted OS related developer, please try to explain?
(And please don't start a Unix/Linux/Mac battle against Windows.)
Peter Mortensen
The cause is usually some irresponsive drivers which have unfinished I/O requests in progress. http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2005/08/17/unkillable-processes.aspx
harrymc
One possible reason: You can't kill a task that's attached to a debugger.
The only solution is to stop the task from the debugger itself.
slhck
Open the Properties page for the project, go to the Debug tab, and check "Enable unmanaged code debugging". Or, uncheck the option for using the host process.
Alex Budovski
Peter Mortensen
One reason would be that you don't have permission to kill it. E.g. if the process is running as administrator and you are a normal user.
BeowulfOF
If the last app.vshost.exe is still running, just connect to that process with the debugger.
Should be found in menu under Debug->AttachToProcess then choose the hanging process and connect to it.
vaughan
When I attach to the process I get "Unable to attach to a crashing process".
This problem is a really annoying one.
r_alex_hall
Perhaps an examination of some of the tools cited here could lead to answers?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/49988/really-killing-a-process-in-windows
(Just now I found that pskill was the only of several tools that could kill a process running under one user's Windows 7 session, from another user's session (or credentials, I suppose.)
Valmond
You can!
Using ProcessHacker (right click on the process) -> Terminator.