I had a weird task manager problem while copying files to my NAS.* When I open Task Manager to look at my network utilization, the little Taskman load bar appears in the bottom right, as expected.* But, it flickers like a bat out of hell.* Clicking and right-clicking on it does not do anything.*
I figured taskman might be off screen, so I tried to do the little trick on moving off-screen windows (read how here), but I couldn’t get any options to come up.* I tried to resize my desktop, but all desktop personalization options wouldn’t show.* A reboot didn’t help either.
I need to kill the task manager, but I can’t access through the gui.* So what do you do when the GUI fails you?* Go into the command line!
I had to go to the command prompt (type cmd.exe in a Run dialog).* Then type “tasklist” to bring up a list of all running processes.* Sure enough, taskman.exe was in the list.* I took note of the process id (in this case 4397), and then ran taskkill to kill the process, like so…
taskkill /pid 4397
The hung process immediately* stopped, and task manager was visible again.* The Desktop Management windows that were hung also appeared.
Hopefully this little tip will help someone overcome some goofy problem that can’t be resolved using the Windows GUI.
