Is there a kill -9 for Windows? Die program, die already!?

Question

Every once in a while I will run into a stuck program that will not die - no matter if I right-click and close or run task manager and click the program and click end program. Today Firefox was in just such a hung state and even attempting to kill the processes (having tried the other methods) would not work. After a half hour of screwing with this I had to reboot with the power switch because I couldn't close the thing down for the stuck process. Tips on killing the unkillable?

Good tip on the shutdown. I used shutdown -f -r and that worked. But I'm not in a stuck situation. Will give it a try the next time the WinBlows.

Answer 1

Hey, Cmon, it's Windows... you have to reboot. Sometimes twice :-)

Answer 2

This application doesn't always work but it is avery good alternive to micorsoft's task manager.

Process Explorer NT (made by the guy who discovered the SONY rootkit)
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html

Download and extract it to your harddrive. Run it. It might say something about symbols, just click OK

Goto OPTIONS and select REPLACE TASK MANAGER and try it out for a while. If you don't like it just goto OPTIONS again and uncheck REPLACE TASK MANAGER. It brings new life to CONTROL-ALT-DELETE

Also check out this companies other process monitoring and killing apps.
http://www.sysinternals.com/ProcessesAndThreadsUtilities.html

Answer 3

try the command 'shutdown -s or -f' im cannot quite remember the correct switch but its one of those, in dos prompt or run utility. its supposed to kill all processes and restart system processes including the explorer. :)

Answer 4

No there isn't. Windows can be particularly buggy in this situation. Makes you wonder why people even use windows.

The best thing you have is "end process" (not end program)... clearly you've already tried that.