43 thoughts on “How to Kill a Windows Service which is stuck at stopping”

      1. open the service and click on the recovery tab.
        the the first and 2nd failure to do nothing.

        then kill the task and it will kill properly.

    1. Omg u commented this on 2015 and i was stuck between a service which is some sort of virus and your given command worked like a charm thank you soo much

  1. Hi

    Thanks for the page, but when I run the command “taskkill /f /pid 274428” to kill a SystemEdge SNMP service which has been in a “Stopping state” for 4 days, it gives me an error of “ERROR: Unknown error 0xFFFFFFFF”.

    So instead I went to Task Manager – Services tab – Located “sysedge”, right clicked that service, clicked “Go to process” (Show Processes from all users if it doesn’t highlight the service as it is not run under your account), end the sysedge process.

    This killed the process where the command prompt was not able to and after 4 days of “Stopping” it is now “Started”.

    1. Thanks DK. This worked for me. There was an authorization issue that prevented me from successfully stopping the service in cmd.

  2. When I type in the command it says “ERROR: The Process with PID 1080 could not be terminated. Reason: Access is denied”

    What do I do?

      1. Thanks Brett…. Tried all other methords, I was Stuck in this for 4 hours.
        But Process Hacker did the job. !!!!! Thanks a lot…. 🙂

  3. this method would kill all services with the same PID, if i do this with windows update (which is hogging cpu) it will close others of the same PID, this i know will cause my pc to reboot, is there anyway to close an individual service without closing all services with the same PID

  4. Those methods did not for me. It is saying unrecognized command and invalid argument /option, respectively. And I typed it in exatly the way you said.

  5. Thank you. This was just what I needed. Successfully killed the service. It Stopped, and then restarted on it’s own, as configured.

  6. I have got below error
    ‘taskill’ is not recognized as an internal or external command,
    operable program or batch file.

  7. I get access denied and what’s stopping is my Audio, I’ve restarted and tried this. I can’t go through the hassle of getting a process hacker. Please help

  8. Thank you. This was just what I needed. Successfully killed the service. It Stopped, and then restarted on it’s own, as configured.

  9. I’m facing the below error while deleting the process

    ERROR: The process with PID 6344 could not be terminated.
    Reason: There is no running instance of the task.

    Though the process exist and reflecting in tasklist also.

  10. Problem I found is, once the PID killed successfully, when I went to restart the service I got:

    Windows could not start the ServiceName on Local Computer. For more information, review the System Even Log. If this is a non-Microsoft service, contact the service vendor, and refer to service-specific error code 0.

    What now? Service is dead for good?

  11. Hey, this method worked for me. But I would like to disable the service, do we have a disable command too?

  12. Today this article saved us from the debacle that is Acronis Cyber Protect and it’s constant service failures. Thank you dearly for sharing this. ?

  13. (Formatting stuffed up upon submitting the first time)

    So, when TASKKILL doesn’t work in Windows, or refuses to kill the processes, can also try these which will work better, all depending on various I/O that may be stopping TASKKILL utility
    :

    wmic process where “name=’process-name-with-these-surrounding-apostrophes-included’” delete

    example:

    wmic process where “name=’fred.exe’” delete

    OR

    use TSKILL TSKILL process-name.exe

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