Killing "Not Responding" Processes in Windows 8... why can't I do that anymore?

R

/rant/

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 18, 2008
Messages
384
Dear community,

For quite some time I am having this problem with the Windows 8 task manager (and all other tools, like, taskkill) being useless when I need it the most. I am unable to kill certain (I'm tempted to say 'all') processes which are no longer responding (that's why they need to be killed in the first place). Task manager just gives me the "Access Denied" treatment. I'm not trying to do anything special here and it happens with any app. Just minutes ago, Visual Studio stopped responding and I had to reboot to get rid of it. It has happened before with Internet Explorer, Chrome, Eclipse, Audacity and other tools as well.

Other people seem to be affected by this as well (try and Google Windows 8 kill process access denied). Why is this happening and why the hell can't I just kill these crashed programs anymore as I could in the past ten years. Responses people get range from "Please reboot" to "Reinstall Windows" to "Buy a Mac" (which already have - but I still have to work with Windows) - none of which are solutions to a seemingly systematic problem in Windows 8 :(

Anybody have other ideas on this issue? Really annoying...

Thanks for any ideas
 
Why is your system crashing so often? Sounds like you have worse issues.
 
I've never had a problem killing processes, and have been using Windows 8 since launch.

Could it be a permissions issue in regards to the user account type or UAC setting?
 
It is most likely UAC.

In Windows 8, as user account has two tokens -- a normal user account and an administrator account. By default, all actions are performed using your user token. This would provide you with enough rights to stop tasks that you personally started.

In order to terminate a process from a different user (network service, system, etc), you need to elevate your user account. That can be done multiple ways. To test to see if this is causing your problem, open a command prompt as an administrator. You can do that by right clicking your Command Prompt (or powershell icon) and choosing Run as Admin. If you did this correctly, the title bar should say ADMINISTRATOR in it. If it doesn't say this, then you did it wrong.

From here, you can use taskkill or even open up taskmgr.exe (task manager). It will be running under your Administrator token and you should be able to kill processes that you couldn't before.

With that said... there are sill some exceptions, and you won't be able to kill all processes. But this should get you what you're looking for.
 
Having UAC on does not prevent you from ending processes that are started from the same user account.
 
/rant/ said:
Dear community,

For quite some time I am having this problem with the Windows 8 task manager (and all other tools, like, taskkill) being useless when I need it the most. I am unable to kill certain (I'm tempted to say 'all') processes which are no longer responding (that's why they need to be killed in the first place). Task manager just gives me the "Access Denied" treatment. I'm not trying to do anything special here and it happens with any app. Just minutes ago, Visual Studio stopped responding and I had to reboot to get rid of it. It has happened before with Internet Explorer, Chrome, Eclipse, Audacity and other tools as well.

Other people seem to be affected by this as well (try and Google Windows 8 kill process access denied). Why is this happening and why the hell can't I just kill these crashed programs anymore as I could in the past ten years. Responses people get range from "Please reboot" to "Reinstall Windows" to "Buy a Mac" (which already have - but I still have to work with Windows) - none of which are solutions to a seemingly systematic problem in Windows 8 :(

Anybody have other ideas on this issue? Really annoying...

Thanks for any ideas
Click to expand...

If you have a Mac run windows in a virtual machine, problem solved. As others said if your Win8 crashes apps you have either a bad driver installed or a hardware problem. Have you run memtest and drive health checks?
 
As a matter of fact, the problem yesterday occurred in a virtual machine on my Mac. It has also occurred on the hardware installation. And on a regular HP desktop computer. And a Surface Pro. I don't see how this is a driver issue.

The discussion with the UAC seems more interesting. I am aware of the administrator elevation and all that; it's basically been like that since Vista. I also made sure to run all tools in an admin context, even through runas command.

But here's something that changed: I use Windows Live/Microsoft account for the login. Might that have implications here?
 
/rant/ said:
But here's something that changed: I use Windows Live/Microsoft account for the login. Might that have implications here?
Click to expand...

No; it works just like a normal account in regards to permissions and access control.
 
And why are you killing processes in the first place?
 
Because they are not responding and cannot be terminated anymore. But there just doesn't seem to be a solution for this. Too bad.
 
I upgraded to Windows 8.1 Pro with Media Center 64-bit from Windows 8 Pro with Media Center the weekend before last, ahead of its official release, as ever since I did a clean install of Windows on my new Haswell i7-4770K system back in June of this year I've been unable to play The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief on Steam.

The game's launcher will open but as soon as I click on Start Game then I get a black screen with a spinning mouse cursor and the game never loads. I then have to bring up Task Manager to return to the desktop but because the mouse cursor is 'busy' I am unable to manually end the raven_game.exe process that is showing as 'not responding'. However, I found that by opening an elevated Command Prompt or Powershell (which you can now use on Windows 8.1 in place of the Command Prompt) that I can close non-responding processes by typing, for example:

taskkill /im "raven_game.exe" /f

I can still close some non-responding apps normally through Task Manager and, to be honest, I don't usually have this issue anyway. Currently, only The Raven refuses to work with either Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 (but, oddly, it ran fine months ago on my old i7-920 build with Windows 8 Pro and the same GTX 780 graphics card).
 
/rant/ said:
As a matter of fact, the problem yesterday occurred in a virtual machine on my Mac. It has also occurred on the hardware installation. And on a regular HP desktop computer. And a Surface Pro. I don't see how this is a driver issue.

The discussion with the UAC seems more interesting. I am aware of the administrator elevation and all that; it's basically been like that since Vista. I also made sure to run all tools in an admin context, even through runas command.

But here's something that changed: I use Windows Live/Microsoft account for the login. Might that have implications here?
Click to expand...

This is weird since I along many here I'm sure do not experience any hanging processes let alone frequent need to kill them. Are you running antivirus, anti-malware or other nasties perhaps?
 
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