Console windows that cannot be killed by closing or via Task Manager

Question

When I run a test harness through the Visual Studio 2005 debugger, it creates a console window every time I run it.

In the past, the console window would close automatically when the test harness process terminated, but now I'm finding that the console window is hanging around afterwards.

After the test harness terminates:

• I cannot close the console window by clicking the close (x) button on the top-right
• The test harness process doesn't exist anymore in Task Manager

So I cannot seem to kill these console windows.

Does anyone know:

1. How these console windows can exist without a managing process?
2. How can I can kill these console windows?

Rebooting is obviously an option, but there must be another way.

Answer 1

It's a known bug in windows, introduced with KB978037 security patch.

You can find out more here http://blogs.msdn.com/debugger/archive/2010/03/11/help-my-console-windows-won-t-go-away.aspx

and here http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/vsdebug/thread/e6d4a4f5-7002-401a-90e1-6174d7f9e3ca