Taskkill /f doesn't kill a process

Question

When I start up an Experimental instance of VS from VS for debugging and stop debugging (sometimes directly from the parent VS), a zombile devenv.exe process remains running which I am unable to kill. It holds on to many of my dlls.

As I am logged onto this 64bit Win7 machine as Administrator, I would expect to be able to kill any process I wish to.

I tried (from Administrator command prompt):

End Task from Task Manager.
TASKKILL /F /IM devenv.exe
PSKILL devenv.exe

None return any error and TASKKILL and PSKILL returned success messages of terminating/killing the process. But devenv.exe still runs, it is not re-spawned as the PID remains constant. It goes away only on restart of the system which is not a great solution.

Note. LockHunter shows devenv has got a lock on itself. And it cannot unlock it.

The above screenshot is the output of Process Monitor showing devenv to be in some kind of 'Process Profiling' loop (Right click on it and click open image in new tab to see it properly).

Any ideas how to kill such a process on Windows?

Answer 1

you must kill child process too if any spawned to kill successfully your process

taskkill /IM "process_name" /T /F

/T = kills child process

/F = forceful termination of your process