Stop a hung service

  1. Open the Services applet from the 'Administrator Tools' menu; or by right-clicking on 'My Computer' and selecting 'Manage', and then click on 'Services and Applications', then 'Services'.
  2. Locate the service in question, for this example I will use the SMTP "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol"
  3. Double click on that service and you will see the short name of the service, in our example the short service name is SMTPSVC
  4. Open a Command prompt window, (start, run, CMD or COMMAND)
  5. Type the following without quotes, 'sc queryex SMTPSVC' and press enter. Take down a note of the PID number for this next step
  6. Type the following without quotes 'taskkill /PID 8784 /F' Replace the example PID with the PID of the service you are trying to kill, /F is used for force the termination of the service in question 
    Note; you will get a notice similar to the following if the command was successful: 
    SUCCESS: The process with PID 8784 has been terminated
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