Forcing an application to shut down

[PinkPanther 0]

Hello, this is what happened ...

 

MusicMatch Jukebox 7 crashed when it had trouble reading one of my music CDs. At this point, I tried the usual approac of bringing up Task Manager and asking it to forcefully end MusicMatch. After about 20 minutes of waiting and countless requests to the task manager to kill the app, I was forced to log off, since MusicMatch was still running and completely hung. I even tried ejecting the offending CD to see if that would allow MusicMatch to shut down, but no luck.

 

Now, I log off and get the Accoutn selection screen. I log back in and MusicMatch is STILL frozen and on my screen, preventing a successful login. Important Note: I did NOT select switch users, which I know saves your windows state for the next time you log back in. I selected a full logoff, which result in a clean login after that, but somehow, MusicMatch remained. Eventually, I hit the hardware reset button and that finally made MusicMatch disappear.

 

So, my question Is there a better tool than Task Manager to TRULY kill an application once it has hung?

 

Thanks for any information and/or advice.

[Alien 1]

Errr...I think I have 1 a freeware 1 somewhere.....<goes rummaging>

[Alien 1]

I found my copy of it, but when I tried to do a search for it I couldn't find any sites with it, sorry. Besides, I don't know whether it's any better @ killing apps/processes than XP's Task Manager - I haven't really had opportunity to put it to the test.

[Davros 0]

Did you kill it in the Applications tab or the Processes tab of Task Manager?

[PinkPanther 0]

Davros, I tried both. My first few tries were under the applications tab, after that failed, I tried in the processes tab. Both were unsuccessful

[Sampson 0]

I suspect that because MusicMatch JukeBox is calling on several processes that invoke your audio card, CD access, or sometimes even modem-internet communication, ending it, will not stop the others from terminating. Once set in motion, they will happily task away until you stop them.

 

I know this will sound a little offbeat, because I don't know another way of terminating a task than through the task manager. But, some pop up stoppers, like NoAds, will list all of the currently open windows on the Screen. These will include Applications as well as popup ads. So, if you are running Word, it will be listed in the "Currently Open Windows" box. If you ask it to "Add Word to Target", it will remove it from the screen and end its task. You could try it with MusicMatch to see if it will knock it down, then you could bring up the task manager and go after any process that may still be running that MusicMatch put in motion. Once you are stable, you can bring up NoAds again and Remove MusicMatch as a Target.

 

As I said this is offbeat. But nothing else has worked. (NoAds is free www.SouthBayPC.com)

[Alien 1]

PP - although I couldn't find it on the net, maybe you might have some luck - what you want is "Bust! it" by Smoking Sucks Software. Having read what Sampson was saying I think it might do the trick after all.

[bottleneck 0]

X:\i386\taskkill.ex_ with your win xp cd in the cd drive x, unpack it, then use it from the cmd line like e:\taskkill.exe /f /pid [pid of the process you want to kill]

 

and be careful!