Have you ever kill a process or end a task from your task manager and then you get 30 seconds of countdown before it restarts or shutdowns by itself? When trying to manually remove a virus, the first thing to do is to end the process first before removing it from registry. That’s because some virus are persistent and whenever you remove the auto start entry, it’ll add it back again. Let’s say you are trying to end a task of a running virus from your Windows Task Manager. The next thing you get is a popup that says “This system is shutting down. Please save all your work in progress and log off. Any unsaved changes will be lost. This shutdown was initiated by ComputerName\User. Time before shutdown…”

This system is shutting down. Please save all your work in progress and log off. Any unsaved changes will be lost.

Here is how to kill or end a process without getting “This system is shutting down” error popup.

In Windows, one process can potentially spawn or trigger another process to have a child process. If you’ve used Process Explorer before, you’ll know what I mean because it gives you a clear view on that.

To be able to kill the process without getting your system shut down, use the “End Process Tree” from Windows Task Manager instead of end process. However, if you’re trying to kill a virus process, most probably it has already disabled your Task Manager. When trying to launch Task Manager, you get the error “Task manager has been disabled by your administrator”.
Task

Instead of trying to restore Task Manager from registry, you can download a very useful tool called Process Explorer by Sysinternals to do it. Simply right click on the process, and select Kill Process Tree. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut “Shift+Del”.

Process Explorer Kill Process Tree

No more getting “This system is shutting down” error when trying to kill a virus process.

[ Download Sysinternals Process Explorer ]

[tags]process, tree, kill, end, task[/tags]