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.
taskkill /im <process>
:The process can only be terminated forcefully
.taskkill /F /im <process>
:There is no running intance of the task
. :( TaskMgr as admin also can't kill it:Access is denied
.procexplorer
to look at the task and I saw that the parent task wasexplorer.exe
. I killedexplorer.exe
and then the task went away. Nice and simple in the end. I'd put this up as an answer, but it's not letting me for some reason.