The software program works with a so called hitlist that is configured in the program’s settings. The hitlist basically contains names of processes that the user wants to include in the kill command. New processes can be added from the list of running processes that are displayed in an extra tab in the program or by entering the name of the process manually in a comma separated list in the interface or the hitlist.txt file directly.

All it takes to kill all processes that are listed in the hit list is to double-click the program icon of Auto Kill Any Process. This is a manual process and users who want to automate it need to use different applications like Kill Process (see: Batch Kill Processes with Kill Process) or Process Lasso (see: Process Lasso a Process Manager).

The configuration can be changed at anytime by launching the settings shortcut of the program. Auto Kill Any Process requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0. It should be compatible with most versions of Microsoft Windows and was tested on a system running Windows XP SP3. The download is available at the developer’s website.

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I never experienced the behavior on my old computer though and it seemed as if the process would not go away on its own. It was there, eating my CPU cycles even after quitting the program installation.

Apparently mscorsvw.exe is precompiling .NET assemblies in the background which can take anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes and then some more for low priority assemblies. So the easiest way to get through it is by sitting it out.

If you want to get rid of it completely immediately you could issue the command ngen.exe executequeueditems. Ngen.exe is located in the Microsoft .net Framework directory in the Windows dir.

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Kill Process is a process manager developed by Orange Lamp Software Solutions. The main purpose of the application is to provide the user with means to kill several processes at once and it can also prevent that new blocked processes are spawned on the system. That second feature comes in handy in numerous other occasions, more about that later.

The main interface of Kill Process displays a list of all processes that are currently running on the system. The list contains information about each process that includes its name, description and memory usage. Detailed process information are available by selecting the process and hitting enter or right-clicking it and selecting Process Information from the menu.

Processes are automatically added to the kill list once they have been marked for termination. The kill list can contain multiple processes that can be batch killed easily. This comes in very handy if you want to kill processes that spawn another instance of related processes. If you only use this feature Kill Process stops after killing the selected processes, even if a new process that is in the kill list spawns.

This can be prevented by the second feature of Kill Process: Process Scanning. If you activate Process Scanning Kill Process with actively scan the system for processes in the kill list and terminate those processes as soon as they appear as a process. The time between scans can be defined which is essential to prevent cpu overload.

This feature comes in handy in a number of occasions. Say you want to get rid of that dreaded ctfmon.exe or other processes that appear every time Windows starts and you do not know how to suppress them. It is also possible to prevent that applications that you start spawn new processes.

Kill Process can be configured to run silently in the background by suppressing all errors and disabling confirmations.

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The first step was to download the excellent Process Explorer from Sysinternals. This program gives detailed information on all processes currently running on the system including services and files that depend on it as well as the path to the file on the operating system.

All processes that are running on the system are displayed in Process Explorer after starting the application. Press CTRL + L to display a pane at the bottom that displays extensive information about the selected process. Moving the mouse over the process displays information as well but not in depth like the bottom pane does.

Lets take a quick look at what Wikipedia has to say about svchost.exe

In software Svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) within modern versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

At startup, Svchost.exe checks the services part of the registry to construct a list of services that it must load. Multiple instances of Svchost.exe can run at the same time. Each Svchost.exe session can contain a grouping of services. Therefore, separate services can run, depending on how and where Svchost.exe is started. This grouping of services permits better control and easier debugging, but it also causes some difficulty for end users wishing to see the memory usage or vendor legitimacy of individual services and processes.

The last sentence explains pretty much the dilemma that we – the users – are in. How can we figure out if a svchost.exe process is legit and needed or a waste of memory, processing power or even malicious ?

I’m going to explain how you can find out with a good certainty if the process is needed or not. Back to Process Explorer.

Hover the mouse over the first svchost process and take a look at what it is saying. It should display the path plus the services that started this svchost process.

My first service was the HTTP SSL service that was running on my system. A service that is not needed at all on my system. I first thought it had something to do with the ability to open https websites but this is not the case. Completely useless for end users. I opened services.msc and stopped the service and set it to disabled as well.

The svchost process disappeared in Process Explorer. To test that everything was still working I opened a https url in Firefox which was working perfectly fine.

The next svchost.exe process was running because of the Windows Image Acquisition service. I do have a camera that is using this service but I seldom transfer pictures from the camera to my system. I decided to disable and stop this service as well and activate it whenever I want to transfer images. And puff there vanished the second svchost process.

What I did was always the same for every remaining svchost process. Hover the mouse over it, type the service in question into a search engine, read up on it and make a decision if I really needed it. Users who want to be on the safe side stop the service and test if everything is still working as usual. They could alternatively set the service to manual if first tests are successful.

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The only application that I did install the other day was NBC Direct. A quick check of the NBC Direct FAQ revealed that they were indeed using the OpenCASE Media Agent “that manages your video downloads and monitors for any updates and/or new content to be downloaded”.

This means that this thirty Megabyte process MediaAgent.exe is wasting RAM and CPU cycles for doing nothing most of the time. I can understand that this process is started when starting NBC Direct but not if NBC Direct is not running at all.

The OpenCase Media Agent is a service that is installed with NBC Direct in Windows that is automatically started when Windows starts. The option would be to either disable the service which would surely make NBC Direct stop working or uninstall both NBC Direct and the OpenCase Media Agent to get rid of it.

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Config Inspector is a nice little freeware application for windows operating systems that could be described as an advanced task manager. Besides offering more information about loaded applications and processes it also displays vital information about memory and cpu usage, network utilization and general windows information.

A nice handy utility which is only 125K zipped. Just unpack and run, no installation required.

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