topic I have faced this issue, in in Product Forum

Kill Process

BrianneGacad — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 12:35:00 GMT

Hello All, I'm having a very weird issue wherein i do have a stage using "Utility - Environment, Kill Process" with parameter "iexplore" for process name. It's part of my exception handling wherein i kill all existing IE processes first before trying to relaunch the website and try working on the item again. It doesn't kill any process nor does it close the IE browser. Logs show it went to that action but for some reason it does not do anything and just relaunches IE. I then am left with a lot of IE browsers open and a never ending loop of it relaunching. I never experienced any of these when i was running on production laptops, but when we migrated it over to a server platform a lot of errors i never encountered just popped up and not to mention it is running extremely slow!! Any help and guidance is much appreciated Thanks! Brianne

Hi Brianne - if you look in

John__Carter — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 13:19:00 GMT

Hi Brianne - if you look in the code stage in the Kill action you'll see it's not doing anything fancy like re-launching, all it does is try to terminate any exe with the given name. Something else must be causing the re-launches. When you say 'server platform', hopefully you don't have more than 1 user logged into the same OS?

Hey John,

BrianneGacad — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 05:39:00 GMT

Hey John, Thanks for the really prompt reply The relaunch is part of my exception handling, to try and relaunch target app and start process again. My main issue is within that exception handling logic, the kill IE process stage i have is not terminating any ""iexplore"" instances. Do i need to put multiple actions or loop back to the kill IE action x amount of times for it to work? And for the server platform bit, each user (I have 10 total virtual workers running) have its own OS. They use the same codes and the exact same queue which can be viewed from your web desktop (control room) Thanks for the help again!

It sounds to me like your

Denis__Dennehy — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 13:39:00 GMT

It sounds to me like your kill command is correct - and it should kill all running instances of iexplore. So i am not sure what is happening in your case. One point of note is that I would not usually recommend killing IEXPLORE in this way - because it the process often used by lots of different applications. So killing your application could also kill other applications that are running fine - this could cause issue for other people using your objects in their process if they are also using other browser apps. The only truely safe place to kill iexplore would be at the start of your process when you know no applications should be running. Have you tried a cleaner close logic where you terminate the session you are attached to using terminate in a navigate stage.

Kill is, as it sounds, a

John__Carter — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 14:18:00 GMT

Kill is, as it sounds, a brutal way of closing an application. Often it's better to close down more like a user would, eg by closing the main IE window. When restarting you have to be careful not to relaunch too soon, before the previous instance has gone - some apps don't close as fast as you think. The simplest option is to pause before the relaunch, or better still, wait for the detach from the previous instance. The way to do this is to turn in a loop, checking IsConnected every second. When it returns False, go to the End. If you've waited too long and it still returns True, something is wrong.

Recently, I come across

ivan.gordeyev — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 12:56:00 GMT

Recently, I come across similar situation and I found that killing iexplore is the quickest way to deal with application issues (except for 1 error which has a retry button). Turned out to be that a Virtual Machine (VM) was running iexplore in background which could only be closed as administrator. This can be tested form command prompt - Start > Run ""cmd"" type ""tasklist"" and look for iexplore. To clarify, even if task manager in Windows does not show it as running the command prompt window will. You can test it to see if an admin permission is required by using TASKKILL /F /IM iexplore.exe /T (please note that it will close a browser, if you reading this message in ie). For me the solution was to close IE 6 times and then continuing running the process. On some occasions IE have tried to recover from being closed in such a manner, hence as the people above say, this is not necessarily a good way of closing the application, but it fits some of the circumstances.

Hi All,

NileshJadhav2 — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 15:33:00 GMT

Hi All, I was facing same issue 'Utility - Environment, Kill Process' not working to kill IE however i just remove "".exe"" from input parameter.(just put iexplore) Now its working fine. hope it will help you

Hi, I just encountered this

WesGrey — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 05:14:00 GMT

Hi, I just encountered this issue too with IE. I've experimented with a simple process on multiple machines where the only action is to kill IE. For one particular machine, ""Utility - Environment"" >> ""Kill Process"" doesn't work. I've tried ""iexplore"" and ""iexplore.exe"" as the parameter, and IE just doesn't want to shut down. But for some reason, it's working perfectly fine on my other computers that are effectively set up identically. Any suggestions here?

I've seen this before. I

MikeHiggs — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 02:18:00 GMT

I've seen this before. I always use a clean up stage (nice name for kill) at the start of my process to get rid of straddling instances. Always have a short sleep afterwards before trying to launch as iexplore can take time to actually die. ""iexplore"" not ""iexplore.exe"" in the kill action

I have faced this issue, in

chethanmogarala1 — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 13:45:00 GMT

I have faced this issue, in my QA environment, the kill command requires administrator permissions to kill any process, the kill process command in the kill process action is surrounded by try catch and hence that will not throw you any exceptions, if you remove that exception handling in the code stage of kill process action, then you might come to know the exact issue why it's failing to kill. Give a try.. hope this will help.

Hi,…

Paul.Curran — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 21:10:00 GMT

Hi, I have a similar problem. I have a process with an .exe that BP recognises as 'Exists' but 'Kill Process' has no effect so will result in an infinite loop if not handled. Even when stepping through the action it has no effect so I don't believe its anything to do with a delay as I can wait for hours and the application remains active. I've been trying to work around the issue by terminating the program but this causes a scenario where multiple instances are being held of another program which then causes the process to fail to launch. Any ideas? Paul.

Re: Kill Process

aaron.diaz — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 20:39:39 GMT

Hello Brianne,

I just had a similar case with this working on a client platform. As already mentioned by others the code here in the Utility is meant to close out all instances found of a program name given. So for example with iexplore it would then close out every instance you have of Internet Explorer. However this code is not compatible to when there are multiple users left logged into a machine. For your case any anyone else seeing this would recommend double checking in task manager how many users are logged in. Here is an example of one user:

If you have a case where it shows other users for example but are disconnected this will cause the code to attempt but be unable to close the application due to not being able to make sure it is on the current user only it will then accept the kill command and then move on which would result in the performance, you have reported. Let us know if this resolves the issue for you or if you have only one user on the machine and still have the issue. Would be good to get a screen shot of the user's tab like I showed here 🙂