Thursday, July 3, 2008

Killing programs on Windows shutdown

My Windows computer at the office takes quite some time to restart... so, whenever there's an update or such that requires a restart, I wait for a moment that I'm away from the computer to do so. Turns out that it's not that unusual to return to a dialog box stating that some program has failed to exit with a button to "click to end".

Fortunately there's a workaround for this not so smart behavior. Start regedit (*sigh*), go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop and alter the key AutoEndTasks to the value 1.

PS: I'm not really sure if this works, because I'm always away when my computer reboots... but I haven't seen that message again!