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How to Kill a Windows Service that’s stuck on Stopping or Starting

  • Jatin 

If you ever have trouble with a service being stuck in a ‘starting’ or ‘stopping’ state, you can run a couple of simple commands to kill the service as mentioned in the steps below:

Step 1: Make a Note of the Service Short Name:

Goto Task Manager -> Services Tab (as shown in Picture below)TaskManager

Step 2: Query the Process:

To kill the service you have to know its PID or Process ID. To find this just type the following in at a command prompt:

sc queryex servicename
<Press Enter>

Replace ‘servicename‘ with the services registry name. For example: Print Spooler is Spooler. (as shown in Picture below)

QueryProcess

Step 3: Find out the PID:

After running the query you will by presented with a list of details. You will want to locate the PID. (Marked in the Picture)

QueryProcessMarked

Step 4: Run Taskkill Command:

Now that we have the PID, we can run the following command to kill the hung process:

taskkill /f /pid [PID]
<Press Enter>

This will force kill the hung service. (as shown in Picture below)

Taskkill

If this article helped you or if you have further suggestions, please feel free to comment below.

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