Windows – Stopping an unstoppable service

serviceswindows-vista

I have antivirus service (Kaspersky) that occasionally becomes unresponsive to the normal stop/stop gui interface provided by said vendor. I would like to find a way to kill the service for a restart without rebooting, however all attempts I have tried result in failure with an 'Access is Denied' error. These include:

  • Services Control Panel (grayed out stop button)
  • Task Manager
  • Killing Process Explorer Killing
  • command line net and sc stopping
  • runas with domain admin using net stop

Some details include:

  • Machine: Windows Vista
  • Service Type: 10 WIN32_OWN_PROCESS
  • Service State: 4 Running (NOT_STOPPABLE, NOT_PAUSABLE, ACCEPTS_SHUTDOWN)

Best Answer

@richard states:

If Process Explorer is unable to kill the process ... then it is really unkillable.

Not correct, there are certain processes I couldn't kill with Process Explorer but with other tools like rootkitunhooker.exe.

Also Process Explorer does not show RootKit processes, so it also can not kill them.

I usually use the "psexec -s" approach.

pskill.exe may not work within psexec -s, but I have described a workaround for that.

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