One real annoyance I have is that youcan get processes pegging the CPU to 100% or going crazy on the disk and you can't get the task manager to come up so you can kill them. Iwant a way tohave the task manager always available and to be given priority so it can launch and kill other processes.We should always be able to quickly and easily get to the task manager and be able to kill any process. Otherwise the only solution ishold the power button which isn't good.

When there's that much stress on the system and you try to bring up task manager, it's not like it's not trying to appear and allow you to kill the culprit.But I do agree it would be convinient =). All comes down to the power of your hardware.

Your real problem is the that program pegs the CPU, if this program happens to run in kernel space (for instance exectingdriver code in an endless loop) nothing would even be able to kill it. So you need to find out if it's not by (bad)design that is pegs the CPU or if it's simply the result of a bug in the program. MS has a bunch of tools available to help you further investigate this, one great tool to tackle such issues is Process Explorer available from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx

Hit the key combination <ctrl><shift><esc>. That will bring up Task Manager regardless of what else is going one. Once you have Task Manger up and running, go to Options and select Hide when minimized. That way, TM will appear in the tray by the clock when minimized, but it wont take up screen real-estate. However, as Willy Denoyette suggested, Process Explorer is a better tool to use when investigating rouge programs.

SilentUser said: One real annoyance I have is that youcan get processes pegging the CPU to 100% or going crazy on the disk and you can't get the task manager to come up so you can kill them. Iwant a way tohave the task manager always available and to be given priority so it can launch and kill other processes.We should always be able to quickly and easily get to the task manager and be able to kill any process. Otherwise the only solution ishold the power button which isn't good.HiIf you want task manager always to open when you need it,install at least dual core CPU.When something hangs on single core CPU even it runs on lowest priority calling task manager may be imposible withinsingle human life :)On multicore system things looks different :)Now change your thread type to question and mark my replay as answer

Thanks for all the replies. Yes, nthe problem is with processes that are buggy, like IE, or Outlook or....I know about process explorer, but it won't launch in these circumstances, so it can't help. I do hit ctl-shift-esc but can't always get task manager launched. I have a dual core and it doesn't always get started. This was the case in Vista and seems the case in Win 7.