Killing processes on Windows 7

▲
3
▼

I'm debugging plugins on Windows 7 and of course the plugin host (Cubase5.exe) occasionally crashes because of errors in the plugin. On XP or Vista, I could always restart it immediately and continue working. But on Windows 7, even though Cubase appears to close, it is still visible in Task Manager and I cannot kill it by any means. After a minute or two, it disappears by itself. In the mean time, I can't work because the plugin DLL is still locked by the process.

Does anyone know why this happens on Windows 7? I've already tried disabling Automatic Error Reporting but that didn't help. I've tried attaching cdb to Cubase, but I get:

Cannot debug pid 5252, NTSTATUS 0xC0000001
    "{Operation Failed}  The requested operation was unsuccessful."
Debuggee initialization failed, NTSTATUS 0xC0000001
    "{Operation Failed}  The requested operation was unsuccessful."

I tried following the instructions here but it appears this is only possible if I connect a second machine to my computer to debug it remotely.

windows-7
kill
asked on Stack Overflow Aug 25, 2010 by Frederik Slijkerman

5 Answers

▲
4
▼

I finally found the solution, using this article:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2005/08/17/unkillable-processes.aspx

This required installing the Windows Debugging Tools for Windows (nice name) and LiveKd, but by following the steps outlined I was able to track which driver was causing the process to hang: it turned out to be the 64-bit driver for the M-Audio Oxygen 8 V2 controller I'm using. Unfortunately no driver update is available.

Anyway, if anyone encounters a similar problem, this is the way to solve it.

answered on Stack Overflow May 23, 2011 by Frederik Slijkerman
▲
1
▼

Have you tried Process Explorer by Mark Russinovich? It is really useful for "killing":)

answered on Stack Overflow Aug 25, 2010 by Petar Minchev
▲
1
▼

If you have error reporting enabled, it's possible that werfault.exe has Cubase open to write a minidump for crash reporting purposes.

This is just a stab in the dark but it might be your problem.

answered on Stack Overflow Aug 26, 2010 by ReinstateMonica Larry Osterman
▲
0
▼

One thing you can try is to check with Process Monitor what Cubase is doing. Set a filter so that everything with a process name containing "cubase" will be recorded. It could be that you are facing some timeout issue when Cubase wants to exit.

answered on Stack Overflow Aug 25, 2010 by Dirk Vollmar
▲
0
▼

you can end the process the service is running under. You can find this process by going to the Services tab of the Task Manager, right-clicking, and selecting Go To Process(you need to click the Show processes from all users button.). Note that one process may host multiple services (especially if it's svchost.exe), and ending the process will kill all those services. Also, this is an unclean exit, and may cause data corruption depending on what the service(s) was doing when you killed it.

Depending on which specific service you are trying to stop, there may be a cleaner way to simulate failure.

answered on Stack Overflow Sep 27, 2016 by vineel

User contributions licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0