End programs "not responding"

TaskManager Incompetence:
A program stops responding, confirmed by TM.
I tell TM to end program, it presents me with choice of
"End Now ", then does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
How can I clear this crud without rebooting?
(WinXP, 2000, prior versions.)
And why does MS bother to include phantom abilities?

 

Sorry but this sort of generalized rant is a little hard to help out with.

If you can pick some specific examples and give details, you'll probably get some substantive responses.

 

I thought I was VERY specific. Through at least the 32 bit versions of Win I have used (which no longer allows me to reboot in DOS for cleanup), I often have programs that hang, which TaskMgr can't close. Usually I reboot. Now I have some data in WIP that I can't afford to lose. I have found no utilities that can help me out. If I can abort programs that I write, why can't my OS abort other programs that hang and are holding resources? That is part of Managing Tasks. I don't see the difficulty.

 

The difficulty is you are asking windows to be nice about it.

When you end task in task manager, there are two ways to do it. From the Applications tab, you get the sally lightfoot version, a gentle suggestion to end the process. This is preferred, since it will 'gracefully' end the program. If that doesnt work, switch over to the processes tab, and 'end process' the thing. Thats a rude TerminateProcess, and it WILL kill it unless its a system process you dont have permission to whack.

If you want to be a tough guy, go download the debugging tools, and use kill.exe -f. If that doesnt kill the process, ill eat my hat. All bets are off if this hung program has a debugger attached to it, however.

 

I'm afraid I sympathize with our poster, and also feel the tremendous frustration that results from this problem.

I test a few new programs every day. At least one of them will almost always hang the machine. Task Manager, which used to be so good about terminating these things, no longer can kill 90% or more of running processes. This has occurred since installing SP2. It happened before, but SP2 made the problem 10x worse.

Kill.exe, taskill.exe, and taskkill.exe have no better luck at terminating these things than Task Manager. A reboot is always necessary. And, I am not the only one. Discussions of this problem with peers has elicited surprize that everyone was not aware of this horrible problem!

(To my chagrin, my test of LongHorn, on a different machine, shows that the problem still persists in that version, even when trying to kill native Windows processes. But at least in that case, I can say "beta ".)

 

Abraxas, have you tried kill -f ? The ONLY reason that wouldnt kill a process is if a debugger is attached.

WER/OCA does have that 'program not responding' minidumper. Are you seeing that be invoked?

Heres a quick way to check, using LiveKD from sysinternals.

Code:

0: kd> !process 0 0 notepad.exe
PROCESS [B]86897298  [/B] SessionId: 0  Cid: 0158    Peb: 7ffde000  ParentCid: 0444
    DirBase: 1ed21000  ObjectTable: e2417c38  HandleCount:  25.
    Image: NOTEPAD.EXE

0: kd> .process [B]86897298[/B]
Implicit process is now 86897298
0: kd> .reload
Loading Kernel Symbols
................................................................................
Loading unloaded module list
...........
Loading User Symbols
......................
0: kd> !peb
PEB at 7ffde000
    InheritedAddressSpace:    No
    ReadImageFileExecOptions: No
   [U] BeingDebugged:            Yes[/U]

 

Thanks to Joe and Abraxas for taking me seriously, unlike some people.

Joe, "Processes" / kill also does not work.

I am the only user, with logon as "Owner ", not "Admin ". This usually works.

Please tell me more about "kill.exe -f ", because your link goes to a games site.
I supposedly have debugging turned off.

Keep in mind that I program mostly in PowerBASIC and HTML,
mostly end user stuff, so don't know more subtle coding issues.

 

The link you must have clicked on was one of the sponsored ads.

Download the debugging tools from microsoft here:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/installx86.mspx

If you are feeling saucy, go to http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/livekd.shtml and try out the debugging test i showed you above.

I am starting to wonder if this is a side effect of you fancy pants developers disabling Error Reporting in a way that the debugger is latching it, but cant invoke the collection runtime, throwing it into a deadlock, which would make it unkillable

 

Yes, I've tried kill /f, and every other combination under the Sun.

The problem with investigating this problem is that after I try to kill a process and it fails, no more executables are launchable. Though context menus open, attempting to start an exe or to copy or move files does nothing at all. Eventually, unless I reboot within a few minutes, I get a hard lock.

 

ouch thats ugly abraxas. Sounds like its stalled out CSRSS, and the whole box rolls over.

Rax, Find a null modem cable and a second machine, and its easy enough to debug it. Otherwise, you'd need to take a *full* memory snapshot with CrashOnCtrlScroll and do a post mortem debug.

 

This might have nothing to do with it, but sometimes when my system decides it wants to be a PITA, I will kill explorer.exe, and then restart it. Often this will get me back up and running and responding without shutting down.

 

I'll do a little investigating. I do have Debugging Tools and symbols installed, but this will be a chance to try out that new Crash Analyzer from Winternals (if I can get an actual crash to work with ).