XP taskkill fails to kill a task

King Harold · Post by **King Harold** » Fri 31 Aug, 2007 11:55 am

For some reason I have ZoneAlarm installed (I guess I'm a bit paranoid) but sometimes it crashes horribly. When it does so, it leaves the task vsmon.exe running and taking up some resources - more than it usually does (up to 10% CPU even).
So I tried to kill it with taskmanager, I tried to kill it with processexplorer, I tried to kill its individual threads with processexplorer, and finally, because all of these didn't work (access denied) I tried to kill it with taskkill. To my surprise, even THAT didn't work (I tried with and without the /f switch, with the /f switch it said "access denied", without it, it claimed to have killed the task - but it hadn't.).

What use is a taskkiller if it doesn't actually kill the task?

Post by **tr1p1ea** » Fri 31 Aug, 2007 12:36 pm

I happen to think that ZoneAlarm is far too resource hungry. If you are interested in switching, i use Sygate Personal Firewall which does the job, doesnt use much in terms of resources and is free.

King Harold · Post by **King Harold** » Fri 31 Aug, 2007 1:05 pm

Thanx

But still there is the taskkill.exe which fails to kill vsmon.exe...

Homestar · Post by **Homestar** » Fri 31 Aug, 2007 3:05 pm

One time I had a problem with not being able to stop a file from running, what I eventually did, was change the file name, and because the computer didn't recognize the file name, I didn't get the 'file currently being used' message.

If that doesn't work you could also make it not startup with your computer by typing "msconfig" into the run program. Then telling it not to start up with the computer and deleting it that way.

... because it is such a dominant file you're trying to delete (giving it priority over other programs), this might just work when the programs don't ...

dysfunction · Post by **dysfunction** » Fri 31 Aug, 2007 3:08 pm

It's unfortunate Symantec bought out Sygate and discontinued the free version. Now there's no updates, meaning it's incompatible with Vista (my computer doesn't have Vista so that's no problem, but my brother's laptop does, which I often use for internet purposes).

King Harold · Post by **King Harold** » Fri 31 Aug, 2007 3:19 pm

No updates -> incompitable with vista?
that is well weird, how does vista even know it's not being updated?

@Homestar: the file is not the problem, the process is..
The way I finally managed to kill it was by trying to uninstall ZoneAlarm (which errored because vsmon could not be stopped) and then running taskkill on it again - and this time it did kill it. No idea why it helped, but it did. The normal zonealarm process was already killed when it failed btw so that couldn't have been the culprit.

Andy_J · Post by **Andy_J** » Fri 31 Aug, 2007 5:12 pm

I wouldn't be surprised if it uses some hacks to keep it from being killed -- what good is a firewall if it can get killed off?

You might try using taskkill as the System account - at /interactive some:time cmd - and use the System cmd to try taskkill. (I forget the exact syntax of at, though.)

elfprince13 · Post by **elfprince13** » Tue 04 Sep, 2007 2:03 pm

at 10:01 /interactive taskman