The Chrome browser can create a fairly large number of processes that are not necessarily closed when the browser is exited. For instance, if desktop notifications are enabled, various processes corresponding to different plugins that send notifications can be kept running indefinitely.
Unfortunately, this makes switching build channels tricky, because the installer for each channel needs all processes from the channel it's replacing to be closed. (This is not generally an issue for the Canary channel, since it doesn't usually replace another channel, but I expect that it will fail when switching from 32-bit Canary to 64-bit Canary). On Windows, since Google only recently released a "stable" 64-bit build, I expect quite a few people to be switching channels fairly soon.
Is there any easy way to close all Chrome processes before (or while) switching channels? The only way I've found is to manually close all Chrome processes, which seems like something I shouldn't need to do. I thought temporarily un-checking the "Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed" settings box might work, but that did not appear to stop everything. (It would be nice, of course, if the channel installers provided some sort of "suspend all Chrome activity" button or something, which could simply kill the processes since they're automatically restarted once Chrome is installed...)