Windows - process cannot be terminated safely: "Access denied – an attempt was made to exit the running process"
Windows - process cannot be terminated safely: "Access denied – an attempt was made to exit the running process"
Hello, I'm facing intermittent crashes with OpenMW. After those crashes, openmw.exe stops being able to be killed. I've tried checking Task Manager, using PowerShell commands (like wmic or taskkill), and even third-party tools such as System Informer. They all show the same problem: access is denied. The error message says "Access denied: An attempt was made to access an exiting process." It also shows a hidden instance of openmw.exe using more than 4GB of memory—this can be seen with PowerShell's get-process command, which isn't visible in Task Manager and can't be closed due to the same error. Windows 10 isn't rebooting properly, and only a hard-reset option is available. Could there be another method to end an unresponsive process?
It seems very uncommon to find a solution through online searches or chatbots. The operation began in user space, not as an admin or system task.