Killing a crashed Task Manager
I’m running Vista at the moment and it is terrible. I think we are all tired of the appalling file copying mechanism. I came across a new bug in Vista today and thought I’d blog how I got out of it.
Task manager was loaded in and minimized.
Symptoms:
- Right-clicked on the Task manager icon in the systray and the menu appeared. The menu items were click-able but the clicks wouldn’t register. The menu wouldn’t disappear after that, no matter what you did.
- The minimized icon in the systray was spiking, It appeared to be flashing as it rapidly switched from high CPU to low CPU.
- I couldn’t start any explorer sessions using the following methods:
- The WindowsKey-E wouldn’t work.
- Running
explorer
from Start->Run - Clicking New Task… inside the Task manager and running
explorer
- First we need to start a Powershell session, because a normal command window doesn’t have the right tools in its path. Start->Run
powershell
- Next list the processes currently running on the machine.
PS C:\Users\mrn> Get-Process Handles NPM(K) PM(K) WS(K) VM(M) CPU(s) Id ProcessName ——- —— —– —– —– —— – ———– … 118 9 4552 11972 98 0.95 4132 taskmgr …
- Make a note of the the Id of the Task manager process (taskmgr).
- Powershell makers have created a “kill” alias to the Stop-Process command to make it look a bit more like wonderful unix.
kill 4132
- You may find that the systray icon is still present. If you hoover over the icon it will disappear.
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