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Quite often I shut down a software application through taskmanager because it freezes/gives an error/etc.. After that, when I try to restart the application (simply by double-clicking its shortcut), it doesn't start anymore (the process appears in task manager, but the application doesn't open up). The only way to then again start it is by restarting my pc and trying again.

My questions: (1) what could cause this behaviour (2) are there other ways to still start the applications without having to restart my system?

Thanks in advance.

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First of all if you often need to kill unresponsive programs then you should address the underlying problem, because force killing processes can obviously lead to data loss and even (file) system corruption.

There can be many reasons why the forcibly terminated apps aren't starting back up. Perhaps file locks have not been released yet by the OS (as I mentioned here). Perhaps some other required resource is still busy. Perhaps child processes started by the previous instance are still running and preventing the new instance from being launched.

You can try logging off and logging back in, which should work to release all required resources in the same way restarting does. However you probably want to accomplish this without needing to close all other open apps. There's no single generic solution to your problem that will work with all possible apps, so your question is too broad in that regard.

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  • Thank you for your answer :)! One question: "if you often need to kill unresponsive programs then you should address the underlying problem" - it is not that this constantly happens but occasionally it does; are you suggesting that in such cases there would be better ways than to kill the process through task manager?
    – dreamer
    Jun 9, 2015 at 11:17
  • No, if there's no other way out than to kill a completely unresponsive app then that's what needs to be done. What I meant was that when you say "Quite often I shut down a software application", that points to a problem either with the app or your system. That was the underlying problem I was referring to, which should be looked into rather than attempting to figure out the best way to kill and restart the app.
    – Karan
    Jun 9, 2015 at 11:30

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