Killing a single service when multiple services are under same pid using taskkill

Question

I am trying to kill wuauserv on a windows server 2008 R2, however it has the same PID as other services which I don't want to kill. I assume running taskkill /f /pid [PID] would kill them all, how do I target just the wuauserv service?

Answer 1

I don't think there is a way to do that with taskkill.

Find the PID of the svchost.exe process the service runs in:

tasklist /FI "SERVICES eq wuauserv"

Then use Process Explorer and double click on that process and change to the Threads tab, kill the four threads associated with the wuauserv service.

This will leave the process in a un-stable state, but I guess if you couldn't stop it normally, it was unstable already.

Unstable means, the service control manager still thinks it is running and can not stop it.