I have a problem which makes Microsoft Word 2013 crash. Whenever it crashes, I cannot close it – I have to reboot. Killing via Task Manager or Process Explorer doesn't seem to do anything. How do I really kill it?
To be clear, I'm not trying to solve the "it crashes" problem here – I want to kill it after the crash, without having to close all my other programs.
More details:
- When it crashes, I get the "(Not Responding)" in the title bar.
- Then I click the Close ("X") button
- I get a message "Microsoft word is not responding. If you restart or close this program, it will try to recover your information." The options are "Restart the program", "Close the program", or "Wait for the program to respond".
- So I click "Close the program".
- I then get "Checking for a solution to the problem" and "Microsoft Word is trying to recover your information" dialogs.
- Then those dialogs go away, but the crashed MS Word stays on screen.
- I've tried killing the WINWORD.EXE process with Task Manager
- I've tried killing the WINWORD.EXE process with SysInternals Process Explorer
- If I reboot, that works (i.e. the system can close down gracefully… so it must be possible to gracefully kill the thing!)
Software versions:
- Microsoft Word 2013
- Windows 7
All patches from Windows Update are applied.
Edit to add:
When it's sitting there, Process Explorer shows WINWORD.EXE has 1 thread using 24.8% of the CPU – i.e. a whole core on my quad core PC. And, ~15 minutes after it crashed… it finally exited! So it does exit eventually, it's just doing a ludicrous amount of work before exiting. But the question still stands. Surely there must be a Windows equivalent of "kill -9" to really terminate a task?
Best Answer
Open the Task Manager. Click on the Processes tab. From the menu, click View > Select Columns. Checkmark the PID box. OK etc. Note the process ID # of Winword in the Task Manager's list.
Go to a command line (run CMD.EXE). Use
KILL -f <PID>, where PID=the process ID of Winword from above (WITHOUT the angle-brackets).