Cannot kill non-responsive xplorer2 after hanging

[garp99]

I can't find any posts on how to *really* kill the program process.

The program sometimes hangs trying to access a USB attached ext3 formatted drive (with drivers installed).

On Win-XP (SP3), I try to kill the program with the Windows Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del), but I always find that process killing works best under "Processes" tab instead of "Applications".
Try as I might, the process won't die, even trying right-click 'end process tree'.

This problem is also freezing up the taskbar, start menu, etc.

Suggestions other than a reboot?  DOS kill command?

[nikos]

from what you are saying the whole windows explorer is stuck. Do you have problems accessing the same external drive with windows explorer?

for better killing try process explorer by sysinternals, perhaps that will do it

[garp99]

thanks, I've found those and looking at how to use them.
Command line pskill should be useful.

[johngalt]

For an easy interface for using Sysinternal utilities (and NirSoft utilities as well) I recommend http://www.kls-soft.com/freeware/wscc.php

Free for private use, works perfectly well in Win7 Ultimate x64 RTM (and thus should have no issues in other W7 builds as well as previous versions of Windows).