Process Hacker Forums

Hello all!
There is a process on my computer that I apparently cannot stop. Whenever I stop it, it starts up again and it’s not long before it says “Running” on my process hacker screen. I tried going into properties and changing it to disabled, but when it inevitably comes back on it automatically changes the start type to “Auto start.” I don’t want to uninstall it, because I want to turn it on and off at will - start with it on, turn it off, work on something, then turn it back on. I tried setting the start type to boot start, but I received an error message written “unable to change service configuration: parameter is incorrect”. Could anyone help me?

Judging by your description, this is a service. For services, startup times are Automatic (typically, starting when the OS shell is initialized), Delayed Automatic (starting with Windows 7, running services after the shell starts), Manual (running if needed) and Disabled (disabled startup). Other value for services parameters Startup type are not allowed and will result in an error message. For drivers allow too additional Startup type: Boot (running driver then OS start) and System (running driver then kernel start).

Disabling the start of a service or driver is done by setting their Start type parameter to Disabled, but the system loader ignores this parameter for those file system drivers that are required to read OS files on a particular machine.

So I can't stop it?

If process is services or driver, then go to Services tab, press Apps or mouse right click button and use context menu for start/stop or other management it. Is very, very simple ...

Yes. I try this, but whatever I do about five minutes later the process goes straight to [running] [auto start]. How do I make it stay at stopped?

HeeWN wrote: ↑14 Aug 2018 23:25

Yes. I try this, but whatever I do about five minutes later the process goes straight to [running] [auto start]. How do I make it stay at stopped?

Forgive, above I have described to you all the possible types of launching services and drivers and their work. Can you first read, try to understand and then if you stay not clear places specify them?

For a temporary solution, you can suspend the process instead of terminating it, for a permanent solution, you can replace the service executable itself with a program that does nothing or is invalid.

FWIW...sounds like you have a process that is invoked by some other means than the normal service manager. Ex. Task Scheduler. If you set the process start to 'manual' (also sometimes called 'Demand') and it continues to restart, something else is restarting it. Other restart possibilities besides task scheduler -- a licensing daemon that launches when a program that uses it starts. An "assistant" service, that helps process something like a browser request -- like some sort of video viewer may be started to play some videos, or if you download a torrent (or magnet), those are usually handled by some sort of bit torrent compatible program -- but I'd think those would usually stay off until you downloaded another torrent file. If you download a zip file and choose to open it, 7z, or some similar util might open to open the file, or acrobat (or its viewer) might open to look at a pdf.

There are tons of helper processes to process various file types/requests. If you aren't using any of those,
then a first place to look might be the task scheduler.

A program 'Autoruns' from 'sysinternals via MS' can show you all the auto-started programs on your system
from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysint ... s/autoruns. Also, it would help if you could tell us the name of the service...maybe one of us has seen this problem and dealt with it...