Randomly Intermittent Thoughts

This is a bit different from my last post about Process Explorer. Process Explorer is so powerful that I accidentally killed a different process than I wanted. This wasn’t through some fancy schmancy search with regular expressions and kill accident. I just highlighted a process and clicked the .

I then proceeded to click ‘Yes’ on the simple dialog: .

Notice the blackened out word at the end of the Dialog’s text? Well that is essentially what my brain did when I read that dialog.

So, long story short I killed the wrong process. Nothing seemed to break for a few hours. Then when I went to debug a couple of things, I wasn’t able to connect to a service that was supposed to be running. I restarted somethings on my end, then remembered, “Oh yeah, I killed a random process earlier.” I restarted the killed service and lo and behold everything started working again.

Lesson learned here kids: Don’t kill random processes and then wonder why stuff breaks!

Process Explorer is part of the Microsoft Sysinternals set of utilities.

Well, I just found another reason to love Process Explorer here: How To Identify What Programs Started svchost.exe in Windows.

This article describes how to use the command line and/or Process Explorer to find out what the hell svchost.exe is doing.

Open a command prompt and enter:

tasklist /svc /FI “IMAGENAME eq svchost.exe”

The above command will list all the svchost.exe processes and display the programs (DLL’s) that have been started by svchost.exe.

Process Explorer is part of the Microsoft Sysinternals set of utilities.

Hopefully, this will become a series of posts. We’ll see!