What to Do When Task Manager Won’t End a Process

Quick Tips

• One of the simplest solutions is to end the entire process tree rather than just one process.
• Use Task Manager as an administrator, which needs to be searched for specifically.
• If you consistently can’t kill a process, you may need to reboot.

If you go to Task Manager and click “End task,” but the entry remains, you might have a problem. This is only worse if Task Manager won’t end process threads at all.

However, the reason behind this is that “End task” mostly asks the application to close normally. An app that has stopped processing at all never gets the request, so nothing happens. Some processes can’t even be stopped at all, like protected system utilities or security software. Here’s what you can try if a process won’t end in Task Manager.

Fix 1 – End the Tree if Task Manager Won’t End Process

Modern apps can use multiple processes, which is why you might see a browser with a large number of processes listed under the same app. You can end the process tree to terminate the selected process and its child processes at once.

Step 1. Open Task Manager.

Step 2. Go to the “Details” tab.

Step 3. Find the name of the process or application you want to end, then right-click on it and select “End process tree.”

If you know the app you want to close, right-click it on the “Processes” tab and choose “Go to details” to open the “Details” tab with the associated process selected.

Fix 2 – Use the Command Prompt

The Command Prompt includes commands that can forcefully terminate some processes that may not close through Task Manager.

Step 1. Open the “Details” tab in Task Manager so you can see the names and process IDs (PIDs) of apps you want to close.

Step 2. Open Command Prompt as an Administrator.

Step 3. Run the following command:

taskkill /f /t /pid 1234

Replace the numbers with the PID of the program you want to close.

Note that this closes the process with the specified PID and, because it uses /t, any child processes started by that process. You can also specify multiple PIDs, with each one preceded by /pid, to close multiple processes.

You can also use a filter that sweeps up anything Windows has already marked as hung:

taskkill /f /fi “status eq not responding”

Fix 3 – Use Stop-Process in PowerShell

PowerShell provides a similar solution when Task Manager will not end a process.

Step 1. Open PowerShell as administrator (right-click on the Start icon and select “Terminal (Admin)”).

Step 2. Locate the process with:

Get-Process *chrome*

Step 3. Use the following commands:

Stop-Process -Id 1234 -Force

Stop-Process -Name chrome -Force

Fix 4 – Find What’s Blocking the Process

Sometimes the process is waiting on something else before it can close.

Step 1. In Task Manager, open the “Details” tab.

Step 2. Right-click the stuck executable and choose “Analyze wait chain.”

Read the result. If a second process appears beneath it, that one needs to be closed first or have its thread finished. End it, and your app usually unfreezes or closes on its own.