The Windows Club

TheWindowsClub covers authentic Windows 11, Windows 10 tips, tutorials, how-to's, features, freeware. Created by Anand Khanse, MVP.

How to force close a Program which Task Manager cannot terminate

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In this post, we will see how to force close a program, even when the program won’t close with Task Manager. To close unresponsive tasks or programs, you can also use taskkill.exe, keyboard shortcut, free tool, or the End tree command.

Force close a Program which Task Manager cannot terminate

If you open the Task Manager, right-click on the process and select End task, the process should close. If it does not, go to the Details tab, right-click on the process and select End process tree. Maybe this will help. If the Task Manager is still not closing the program, then these suggestions will help you:

  1. Use Alt+F4 keyboard shortcut
  2. Use Taskkill
  3. Kill a Not Responding process using a Shortcut
  4. Terminate ALL open applications instantly.

1] Use Alt+F4 keyboard shortcut

Click on the application you want to close and then press the Alt+F4 keys together and leave them after the application closes.

Read: How to Terminate Microsoft Store Apps.

2] Use Taskkill

Force close a Program which Task Manager cannot terminate

Open the Command Prompt as Administrator and run the Tasklist command; it will show you a list of all the running processes.

To view the processes, type Taskview and hit Enter.

To kill any particular process, use the Taskkill command. For example, to kill Chrome, run the command as:

Taskkill /IM chrome.exe /F

Where /F is used to kill the process forcefully. You can also kill any particular process by using its ID; the tasklist command displays the process ID’s as well. You can see the PID column in the screenshot. To kill any process using its ID, run the command as:

Taskkill /PID 2704 /F

Now to kill multiple processes simultaneously, run the above command with the PIDs of all the processes followed by spaces

Taskkill /PID 2704 5472 4344 /F

Related: Unable to terminate process, Access is denied, The operation could not be completed

3] Kill a Not Responding process using a Shortcut

This post will help you if you want to kill a Not Responding process by creating a Shortcut.

Related: How to Enable or Disable AutoEndTasks in Windows

4] Terminate ALL open applications instantly

See this if you want to terminate or Kill ALL running processes or open applications instantly

These posts may also interest you:

  1. Free tools to forcefully terminate a full-screen application or game
  2. How to force quit a full-screen always-on-top Program or Game.

I hope this helps.

AnandK@TWC

Anand Khanse is the Admin of TheWindowsClub.com, a 10-year Microsoft MVP (2006-16) & a Windows Insider MVP (2016-2022). Please read the entire post & the comments first, create a System Restore Point before making any changes to your system & be careful about any 3rd-party offers while installing freeware.