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Killing a hanging Windows Service

While testing a newly created Windows Service, the service failed on startup. As a consequence, I couldn’t start/stop/delete the service anymore.

To fix it I had to jump through some hoops:

  • First I had to query for all services to find the correct process id. This can be done using the sc queryex command
  • This returned a list of all services:

SERVICE_NAME: WpnUserService_ce0fb

DISPLAY_NAME: Windows Push Notifications User Service_ce0fb

        TYPE               : f0   ERROR

        STATE              : 4  RUNNING

                                (STOPPABLE, NOT_PAUSABLE, ACCEPTS_PRESHUTDOWN)

        WIN32_EXIT_CODE    : 0  (0x0)

        SERVICE_EXIT_CODE  : 0  (0x0)

        CHECKPOINT         : 0x0

        WAIT_HINT          : 0x0

        PID                : 8740

        FLAGS              :

SERVICE_NAME: FailingService.Host

DISPLAY_NAME: FailingService.Host

        TYPE               : 10  WIN32_OWN_PROCESS

        STATE              : 4  RUNNING

                                (STOPPABLE, NOT_PAUSABLE, ACCEPTS_SHUTDOWN)

        WIN32_EXIT_CODE    : 0  (0x0)

        SERVICE_EXIT_CODE  : 0  (0x0)

        CHECKPOINT         : 0x0

        WAIT_HINT          : 0x0

        PID                : 18836

FLAGS              :

  • Now that I have the PID, I can try to kill the windows service using taskkill /pid 18836
  • I got the following error message when trying to execute this:

ERROR: The process with PID 18836 could not be terminated.

Reason: This process can only be terminated forcefully (with /F option).

  • Let’s try this again with the ‘/F’ option: taskkill /pid 18836 /F

SUCCESS: The process with PID 18836 has been terminated.

  • After killing the service, I was finally able to delete it.
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