I have been running into a problem where a user with sometimes get disconnected from a server and the user session is gone but the user has active processes. More specifically, taskmanager the sessionID will not exist in the Users tab but in the Processes tab there will be running processes for that sessionID. This causes major problems on the server because tsadmin.exe will not be able to query the server remotely nor we will not be able to close out those processes. I have tried with KILL, taskmanager, and other sysinternals tools. If the same user were to log back into the server they get a new sessionID and does not help the situation. Also the stuck processes will take up a constant 10-15% cpu. The only way we are able to resolve this is to reboot the server. Now we can't reboot the server during production hours because other users are logged in and working. Having a Ghost Session on a server doesn't seem to cause major problems but there is a performace hit from it. I would like to know if there is a way to close out these processes without restarting the server? There is no session to log off so it makes it kind of hard. The other thing is if I find the SID of the user can I clear that from the registry then try to close the processes? Or is there a way I can access the memory that this user's processes are running and release that memory? Thanks

Sorry for Bumping, but in great need for some help.

Hi, Please try the following: schedule a job using AT command, please note that you need to be at the console, do not use RDP syntax: At 12:00 /interactive cmd.exe The job will be created, launch task scheduler from control panel and manually run this job, it will launch a command prompt, but the difference is this command is now running in the SYSTEM account's context, the SYSTEM account is the most powerful account amongst all accounts. In this command prompt type taskkill /PID processid replace procesid with the process id of the process that you wish to kill hit enter type tasklist in the command prompt and check if the process exists Thanks, Madhurjya Madhurjya Bora OS performance Team, MSFT