Stopping processes when Task Manager reports "Access is denied"

On occasion it may become necessary to forcefully terminate or kill individual processes which have stopped responding or are otherwise misbehaving.

Task Manager provides the ability to do this through its Processes tab, but some when attempting to kill some processes you will simply receive a message stating "Access is denied."

If you are certain that a given process is safe to kill (or possibly just desperate), the freeware command-line utility PsKill from Sysinternals is able to kill many processes which Task Manager cannot.

Basic usage is simply: pskill pid where pid is the Process ID (displayed in Task Manager) or pskill processname. The latter will simultaneously terminate all processes with the specified name.

Note that administrative privileges are required to kill a task. If you do not have administrative privileges, PsKill will return an Access is denied error.

The "extra-strength" process killer in PsKill is also built into Sysinternals' Process Explorer which can function as a Task Manager replacement.

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