Kill a Process which gives access denied

Question

Sometimes I need to kill a process which is giving me "Access denied" when trying to use the task manager or Process Explorer to kill. I am using Windows 7 64bit. I need to be able to kill such a process no matter what. It's not a Windows executable. Is there a "God" tool which I can use to override the kill protection?

Answer 1

Are you on a privileged account? Generally when you receive the "Access Denied" error even on an account with higher access, it is usually because you are trying to kill a service which is critical to the system's operation. Some applications on the other hand, such as VMWare, also implement their own "process protection", even for processes which are not vital to system operation.

If you are on a privileged account, you can give Sysinternals PsKill a shot, I've used it in the past to kill processes that gave me similar error messages. Be careful what processes you're killing though, it may make your system unstable.

Answer 2

1. Open Task Manager. Go to the Process Tab.
2. Right click on the process and click on Properties.
3. Click on the Security Tab and then click on Edit.
4. On the Permissions window click on the Add button to open the Select Users Group or Groups window.
5. On the Select Users or Groups window you can enter the usernames of the accounts you want apply the restrictions.
6. Select your username and set the permissions to deny/allow by checking the checkbox under the deny/allow option.
7. Click on Apply and then Ok.

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Answer 3

It is also possible to kill commands using the Windows PowerShell, use get-processes to list the processes running and then use stop-process with the ID of the task to kill it. Stop-Process.

You may find you need to launch the Windows PowerShell specifically as an administrator.

Answer 4

1. Download "process exlorer"
2. On the process propertis view, select the security tab.
3. Press the permissions button.
4. Press the advanced button.
5. If necessary, add yourself or a group you belong to.
6. Edit your permisisons to include "Terminate". (you will need to already have the "Change Permissions" permisison, or you are out of luck.)

In general the need to kill tasks means somebody is not doing something correctly. I'd look for another solution to whatever problem you are facing. Perhaps if you told us more about that we could find a more graceful option?