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Have local admin privileges on Windows XP, but getting "Error terminating process: Access is denied". How to kill the process?


On one of the Windows XP machines I use regularly, there is a process that starts up periodically. I'd like to be able to kill the process – sometimes – because it occasionally runs when I'm busy doing something machine-intensive.


I've already tried dropping the process priority to "Idle" to mitigate the effects, but it isn't the CPU that's the problem. Rather, the process is very disk-intensive and no matter the process priority, it still causes significant disk thrashing when running, impacting everything else I'm doing at the time.


Using Process Explorer, I can find the process, right-click, and choose Kill Process, but I always get the message "Error terminating process: Access is denied."


This is not an operating system process, but third-party software. What might that process be doing to prevent itself from being terminated?


How can I kill such a process? Is there a way for me to modify the process's security or access control list (ACL) somewhere, using Process Explorer or another tool, so that I can effectively kill it?



Answer



Looks like I'm able to kill the process in question using Process Hacker, which, coincidentally, I learned about today from a SuperUser Community Promotion Ad:


Process Hacker: more than you ever wanted from Process Explorer.


One of the features listed is "powerful process termination". From the project page:



Process Hacker is a free and open source process viewer and memory editor with unique features such as powerful process termination. It can show services, processes and their threads, modules, handles and memory regions. [emphasis mine]



While I don't intend for to replace Process Explorer, this is certainly a complementary new tool worth keeping around, and I'm curious to learn more about it.


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