How can I prevent an app (specifically zoom) from running in the background when I close it?

When I close a certain app (Zoom) it appears in my notification area and continues to run as a background process. I have to manually right click and exit the program (or open task manager and exit) each time. How can I prevent it from running as a background process and force it to automatically shut down completely when I close the program?

Note: It doesn't appear in settings>privacy>background apps. I already checked that.

Solution 1:

This annoys me too, so I wrote a oneline AutoHotKey script for this:

^q::run, taskkill /f /im zoom.exe

This does the following:

• ^q means control + q. You can change this to another shortcut if you like, I'm just used to using this already for closing programs.
• run, runs the following command in a CMD shell.
• taskkill lets us kill the specified process.
• /f /im zoom.exe means to force close the process called zoom.exe.

If you're new to AHK, you can use the snippet in the following way:

1. Download and install AHK.
2. Save the above script into a file with an .ahk extension.
3. You can add the script to your startup folder (or add a shortcut to it) so it will run in the background when you start your computer.
4. Just remember to ctrl+q when you're done with zoom to close it :)

Solution 2:

I put together a script that will close zoom (if it isn't in a meeting) when Alt+F4 was pressed or to close it outright if Alt+Ctrl+F4 was pressed, both shortcuts still work normally if zoom isn't the selected window.

;Alt + F4 (will close zoom if it is the selected window except during a meeting)

$!F4::
if WinActive("ahk_exe Zoom.exe")
    {
    if WinExist("Zoom Meeting")
        {
        return
        }
    else
        {
        Run cmd.exe /c taskkill /F /IM zoom.exe,, hide
        }
    }
else
    {
    send !{F4}
    }
return

;Alt + Ctrl + F4 (will close zoom if it is the selected window)

$!^F4::
if WinActive("ahk_exe Zoom.exe")
    {
    Run cmd.exe /c taskkill /F /IM zoom.exe,, hide
    }
else
    {
    send !^{F4}
    }
return

I have also compiled the above script into an executable file, this allows it to work even if you don't have AutoHotKey installed.

Download it Here.