This has me baffled.

I was running a program (the program in question is Audacity, but I don't think this is so important) when it become unresponsive. Okay, this happens sometimes. So I went into the task manager and tried to end it.

Well, the GUI vanished, but the process is still running. I have tried taskkill from the command prompt and Sysinternals process explorer. Nothing will end this task (note that the programs act as though it had ended).

Short of restarting my computer, is there any way to end this process?

Hello Turkishcoffee! Welcome back to the forum!

I have marked your thread as open to gain a techs opinion on the matter

Someone will be with you shortly!

Regards,

Smokeycheech

Restart the machine, remove the application and reinstall for starters.

Check for issues on the Audacity site to see if your hardware is the problem, if the problem persists I would contact them with the fault.


I would imagine that you aren't experiencing the issue with any other processes.

Hello Turkishcoffee,

I would suggest you update the software to the latest version. Usually this solves the problems.

Well it's not at all a regular thing, and I do have the latest version, my hard disk failed recently so, yeah, just installed it.

It just seems odd to me that there's no other way to end it, I guess. Ah well, thanks for the help.

Does it still happen? Or has the problem gone now?

TC, you could try using pstools > extract the files to your c:\windows\system32 folder.

If you need to end the task, go to task manager and find the tasks PID. Then go to Start > Run (or the search bar if your running Vista), followed by cmd

From the command prompt, type in pskill followed by the PID, for example, pskill 9574

The other question is, is this really a big problem? does the app require much memory or does it use up CPU resources?

Not all tasks can be terminated easily from Task Manager, but the actual reason why it is not terminating is only something the original developer could tell you. There are many things that can cause this behaviour, hardware problems, conflicting software (such as Security software), and this can also be something built into the code itself. The app itself may be capable of cancelling this request. I've built similar features into my own software so that the app can save it's data before an exit.

EDIT: Marked as Answered.