Processes: When I kill you, that means die

I think the most annoying bug I've found in Windows 7 Beta is that processes that go awry are unwilling to die.

In a previous blog post, I spoke of a problem with Windows Explorer, whereby Explorer tends to misbehave after some major file copies or moves. I ran across that one several times after I had reimaged my machine from Vista to Windows 7 because I was restoring all of my files from an external drive attached to another PC.

Explorer would start misbehaving in the sense that the UI was still somewhat responsive--you could click things, and you'd get feedback sounds, but you couldn't actually change folders. You'd just see the semitransparent green progress bar restart its trot across the address bar. Sometimes, however, Explorer would lock up completely.

Regardless, I would try ending Explorer; in the latter case, I'd have to force it to close. I'd get the "Windows Explorer has stopped responding. Windows is searching for a solution..." And then it would restart. But a quick check in Task Manager would reveal that Windows Explorer was still running in that old process, usually with rather egregious, generous memory consumption. Hmm...memory leak perhaps?

But then I exited iTunes earlier today after syncing my iPhone 3G. iTunes closed but displayed a "iTunes is saving your library." After about 30 minutes of seeing that, I figured iTunes wasn't doing much. Actually, it was, holding 50% solid of my dual-core CPU. It was stuck. So I killed it, or so I thought. Ending the process in Task Mangler, ahem, Manager only ended its CPU consumption. The process lived on.

The same goes for those earlier mentioned explorer.exe processes. Whether I try to use End Process or End Process Tree, in "regular" or "elevated" mode, these processes just won't die! No matter how many times I try to kill them, they just won't die.

The problem with this is that the machine won't reboot, because you'll just get "shutting down..." perpetually displayed, probably because these processes won't terminate.

There are two options here...power down the machine, or if you're feeling bold, kill csrss.exe in (elevated) Task Manager. Doing that will cause an immediate blue screen and subsequent reboot, sparing you the hard power down.

Processes...when I kill you, that means die. Don't hang on to fight another day, darn it!

~M