Occasionally, a process will hang in such a way that I cannot terminate it at all. This seems to have started in Vista and carried over into 7 (Win 7 was a clean install on a blank disk). In XP Pro, process explorer would *always* kill any process I asked it to. It was great, as it enabled me to run without the need to reboot for months at a time.
In my currently existing problem, there are two processes which will not go away. Normally, when these processes arenot hung, I can easily terminate them with process explorer. These processes are legitimate and part of my normal system use. I do not have any malware problems. When these processes are hung, I cannot re-launch their parent applications. It is incredibly frustrating to be unable to re-launch the apps without a reboot.
I cannot end them with the task manager, process explorer, taskkill, or pskill.
Process explorer will return an Access Denied error, and I always run process explorer as administrator. I created a batch file for pskill and ran it as administrator, it also reports Access Denied.
Here is the output from taskkill, when run from a command prompt (which was started as administrator):
C:\Users\Kevin>taskkill /f /pid 996
ERROR: The process with PID 996 could not be terminated.
Reason: There is no running instance of the task.
I have granted my user account (already an administrator) and the administrator account the "act as operating system" security policy assignment. This has not helped.
This problem has occasionally manifested in the past, where the only solution was to reboot the computer when the particular process would hang.
How can I properly kill a process without restriction? The frustration level here is off the chart.
Unfortunately and fortunately, I cannot intentionally duplicate the hung process scenario. Fortunately - because it's somewhat infrequent. Unfortunately - because it's much harder to troubleshoot. However, I suspect this is a core problem in windows 6 and 6.1.
Other responses to this issue I find in these forums range from "It's not like there are a lot of people reporting taskkill failure"(blaming the topic starter's hardware), to completely unrelated walkthroughs for reinstalling various items, to unanswered. This inability to kill processes in 7 and Vista is reported all over the internet. Please, please, somebody provide a real fix or workaround. :(
