When Task-Manager fails... Alternatives?

[Discord]

Here's the situation:

1.) Good ol' Grinenshire is playing a game under WinXP.
2.) The game crashes.
3.) The poor user hits CTRL+ALT+DEL.
4.) The task-manager window appears in the middle of the screen overlaid with the last frame of the game. I.e. everything looks the same, except the rectangular area in the middle which can be detected by the fact of the mouse cursor moving over it.

At this point it's pretty hard to kill the task or the process through blind clicks or TAB and ENTER button coups. The only way out is pressing the OFF button which will close all the apps and perform the shutdown. A similar case just took place recently when the Task-Manager crashed completely. Shutdown still worked.

Now my question, any way I can kill the tasks without going through the whole restart progress or alternatively, is there any way I can kill all the running apps through a keyboard stroke combination, with intrusion of 3rd party software if necessary?

Any thoughts, ideas or whatsoever that might prove useful in the situation? Thanks in advance!:cool:

[ValiantKnight]

ALT + F4 closes your "active" window/program

May not work in all situations
If no active program is up, it brings you to the shutdown selection.

[Renmiri]

Task Manager is it, afaik. If you can't use it to end the nonrespondent game then it's reboot time.


A good test is to try to set and turn off CAPSLOCK. If the light of it being on doesn't change regrdless of how many times you press it then the PC is frozen for good - even keyboard input is flummoxed - so it is time to reboot.

[rubah]

leave another window open and alt tab to it?

(it works when explorer.exe crashes)

[Discord]

Task Manager is it, afaik. If you can't use it to end the nonrespondent game then it's reboot time.


A good test is to try to set and turn off CAPSLOCK. If the light of it being on doesn't change regrdless of how many times you press it then the PC is frozen for good - even keyboard input is flummoxed - so it is time to reboot.

No, that's not the case. I can close all the apps perfectly by pressing the shutdown key. What I'm asking myself is there any way I can bring the system to a shutdown without actually shutting down. I.e. let it close all the apps, etc, yet stop at the actually bit of logging out and turning off.

[Mirage]

Try making a hotkey for "log out"

[Discord]

Try making a hotkey for "log out"

Actually, that's not a bad idea. Should work.

[The Summoner of Leviathan]

Try making a hotkey for "log out"

Actually, that's not a bad idea. Should work.

Window Key + L brings up the log out dialogue, where it will ask if you want to sign out as the user or change users. If that was what you were referring to.

[Discord]

Try making a hotkey for "log out"

Actually, that's not a bad idea. Should work.

Window Key + L brings up the log out dialogue, where it will ask if you want to sign out as the user or change users. If that was what you were referring to.

Well, it doesn't actually close the apps, but it minimises the windows allowing me to run taskmanager again. Thus it works.

Thanks a bunch everybody!

[ValiantKnight]

windows key + D

Displays the desktop and should minimize all windows.

[crono_logical]

One thing I used to do was use PSTools (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/pstools.mspx) to kill apps remotely from another machine over the LAN if I needed to :p Command line stuff though :p