How to Kill an Orphaned Process

ID: Q197155

The information in this article applies to:

SUMMARY

When a service terminates abnormally, it sometimes leaves "orphaned" child processes behind. This article describes several ways to remove such a process.


MORE INFORMATION

The easiest method to use is the KILL command from the Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit:

KILL <process name or id>
-or-

KILL -F <process name or id>
The list of processes and process IDs can be obtained from the Task Manager or with the TLIST utility from the Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit.

If neither of these commands work, and the Schedule service is running on that computer in the Local System context, you might be able to successfully terminate the process by scheduling one of the above commands with the AT utility:

AT <time> /INTERACTIVE CMD /C KILL -F <process name or id>
If this is also unsuccessful, as a last resort, you might be able to use the PVIEW utility from the Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit, Supplement 3, to adjust the permissions on the process and then kill it. You must be an administrator to perform this task.

To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Start Pview.exe.


  2. Select the target process from the drop-down list of processes.


  3. Click Process in the Security frame. Adjust the permissions of the process to give Administrators (or the currently-logged-on user) all accesses to the process. Repeat this for Thread security and Process Token security.


  4. Use Kill App to terminate the process.


If none of these procedures work, you must restart the system to terminate the process.


REFERENCES

For additional information on how this problem can arise, and for alternative solutions to the problem, please see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q142011 How to Close a Remote Process by Using the Scheduler Service

Q138340 Trouble Quitting Program Started with AT.EXE Scheduler 


Keywords          : 
Version           : WinNT:4.0
Platform          : winnt 
Issue type        : kbhowto

Last Reviewed: February 25, 1999