I'm trying to deal with a zombie problem. Every process I load in Windows 8 sticks around as a zombie.
A couple notes: a restart works, but takes a while. It's a solution, but not my favorite. Zombie processes in my case fill up 16k in the page table and 4k in private memory. All the information I've managed to collect come from Rammap, a system utility.
In Rammap I see a variety of processes:
wuauclt.exe
wsqmcons.exe
WSHost.exe
WOTLauncher.exe
WorldOfTanks.exe
WmiPrvSE.exe
WLMerger.exe
wemgr.exe
...
Big problems are PING.EXE and conhost.exe
This problem forces me to restart my computer once a day to play games at all, and it's quite aggravating. (the games are spawning many PINGs and conhosts)
How can I find out what process(es) to kill in order to get rid of the zombie processes?
Best Answer
In Windows a zombie process is often the result of a buggy driver - and that would be my first suspect, especially with so many unrelated processes remaining. Check out Cannot end Windows 7 Process, even tried pskill and Why do some process stay in Task Manager after they've been killed? for additional information.
Check for driver updates. I would pay particular attention to graphics and networking drivers. You might be able to remove those drivers and see if it helps.
Especially if this is a recent issue, you can try reverting anything that has changed. System Restore tends to work reasonably well for undoing driver installations.