How to kill tasks in Windows 7 when even Task Manager won't open or respond?

Occasionally one of my computers will get so bogged down that everything locks up, Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't work, Task Manager won't open, or they work, but are opening so slowly that it will take hours or days to shut down other processes and regain control of the computer, etc.

Is there a way to, for instance, force Task Manager to be highest priority so it always opens immediately with Ctrl+Shift+Esc even when some other process/driver is hogging the CPU? Is there some other program that can run in the background and open immediately like this?

This question isn't about fixing "underlying problems". No matter how much memory you have, it's still possible for a rogue process to eat it all up and lock up the computer in page fault thrashing, hog the CPU, etc. This question is about how to take back control of the computer when that happens.

Basically when these kind of lock-ups happen, I want to open some kind of task manager that pauses every other process and allows me to kill one of them, and then let everything resume so I can save my work, etc. Otherwise my only option is to hold down the power button.

Antifreeze is supposed to do exactly what i want, pausing all other applications and starting a task manager to kill the offender, but in my testing, it actually does neither.

You can kill tasks using command prompt.

1) Windows Key + R (Run)

2) Type 'cmd' and hit enter

3) Type the command tasklist , press enter. you can see all tasks running in your system.

4) Kill particular task/application by taskkill /f /im taskname

Eg: If you want to kill notepad, type taskkill /f /im notepad.exe

Edit

If you know the application name, then you can issue the taskkill command directly in the run text field.

Process Tamer is a small and nifty utility that achieves your final goal, while going about it in a different and probably better way.

Rather than raise the priority of the Task Manager, it lowers the priority of any out of control process, preventing the kind of lock-ups that you are referring to.

However, if you still just want to permanently raise the priority of a process such as the task manager, you can use this other utility, Prio, but be careful when setting high priorities on multiple processes.

If you get the below error when trying to kill the process using taskkill:

C:\>taskkill /f /im firefox.exe
ERROR: The process "firefox.exe" with PID 7808 could not be terminated.
Reason: There is no running instance of the task.

Then it means Firefox is waiting for above service to be stopped. You need to kill that process first before killing Firefox process. Most likely it is Flash or Acrobat reader, ...

For my case killing Firesvc.exe always works. I hope that helps others too.

Sounds like there are deeper issues here, I rarely run across windows 7 machines that have difficulties launching task manager, (on even the most infected of machines)

With that said, even the lowly task manager requires memory to run so if you are maxing out your ram by opening hundreds of tabs or thousands of apps you will have issues using any utility.

Most of the time you can launch it but you have to wait for DAYS before it finally loads into memory, especially if other processes are hogging resources.

Add memory or consider cleaning your computer of apps and processes that don't need to be running.