I think I used WMI at one point, and that worked OK - provided the script runs with the access rights required to kill the processes in question (in other words admin rights for system processes, user rights for user context processes - I suppose there could be NT Privileges / NT Rights (system wide privileges) and custom ACL permission settings (access control list - attached to objects) involved as well - the configuration of which might vary from site to site):
Note: the below script will kill all Notepad.exe processes! (unless access is denied)
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colProcessList = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
("Select * from Win32_Process Where Name = 'Notepad.exe'")
For Each objProcess in colProcessList
objProcess.Terminate()
Next
Some Links:
- Close an application using VBScript (several other options)
- Kill a process which says “Access denied” (auperuser - Terminate Process ACL)
- Unkillable Processes
