Whatâs the difference between Closing and Killing a program?
There is a difference, and itâs an important one.
I liken it to the difference between asking someone to leave, and physically kicking them out of the door.
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When you close a program â through any of a number of standard ways â what youâre actually doing is asking the program to close itself.
When a program shuts down or âclosesâ, it has the opportunity to finish writing to any files it might have open, save your settings, save your documents, delete any temporary files, and otherwise perform an orderly exit.
Itâs like asking a guest to leave, and as they take their time on the way out they make sure to finish their drink and take their coat.
âKillingâ a program â which typically takes a special utility like Task Manager or Process Explorer â doesnât ask the program anything. The operating system is instructed to stop running the program immediately. The program has no say in the matter. It doesnât get a chance to clean up on the way out, and thus documents may not be saved, temporary files may not be deleted, and so on.
If you physically kick your guest out, their drink might be left half-empty, and they might well leave their coat behind. But one way or another, the guest is gone.
Now, things can get a tad confusing because some programs donât really exit when you ask them to close. Continuing the metaphor, after asking them to go itâs as if your guest ducked into the closet instead of leaving. Theyâre still around, you just canât see them.
I see this in Microsoft Outlook from time to time â you type ALT+F4 to exit, and by all appearances it has. But if you fire up process explorer youâll see that OUTLOOK.EXE might still be running. You can then use Task Manager to kill it, if you like.
Programs do this for various reasons â the most common being that when you then ask them to start again, they appear more quickly. (No, Iâm not going to extend my metaphor any further, even though itâs tempting to have something about your guest suddenly jumping out of hiding when you call and ask him to return. )
Other programs may have other reasons for hanging around; perhaps they actually appear to exit very quickly, but the actual process of closing and cleaning up might take some time.
As you can imagine, actually killing a program shouldnât be done lightly. In fact, it should never really be necessary, but reality is that sometimes you have to kick out your misbehaving guest. The risk is that you might lose whatever data that program was operating on and might leave orphaned temporary files that otherwise would have been automatically cleaned up.
In addition, it can be risky to kill system processes like svchost, lsass and others. If they can be killed (some cannot), itâs possible to crash your system on the spot.
Brilliant metaphor, Leo, and spot-on, as usual. Now, can someone explain to me the difference between forcibly ending a task or application (e.g. via the Applications tab of Task Manager) and killing the underlying process or process tree (in the Processes tab)?
I think the Applications tab shows only the things you can see (like the browser youâre using to view this page), while the Processes tab show all running processes. I think thereâs no real difference between killing in the Applications tab (hitting End task) or killing the same process in the Processes tab.
Mike, thatâs what I would hope. But sometimes hitting End Task doesnât end the task, yet that task can be ended by ending its Process. I am curious how End Task could ever fail to end the task.
From what I can tell, using âEnd Taskâ from the Applications tab is just the same as clicking on the [X] button. You attempt to close the program, so it tries to go through itâs orderly shut down.
V useful pointer, as usual. Thanks Leo.
The d/l page says that procept is for Win 2000. Is it OK for XP SP3, please.
Regards
DAVID
I have an urgent problem that procept might solve: please could you find/make time to give me an answer ?
20-Nov-2008
When leaving a program such as CC cleaner or any other does it matter if you go through the exit routine or just hit the âXâ in the upper right corner ?
29-Nov-2011