Trilight Zone

[digital8]

Windows XP pauses for a short while before prompting us to shut down an application with the “not responding” message. Choosing to end the process in Task Manager prompts us with additional messages. A simple registry hack allows XP to kill a hung process automatically, so us busy admins can get back to work.

Step 1)
To make the change only for you:
Open REGEDIT and browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER
To make the change for all users:
Open REGEDIT and browse to HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT

Step 2)
Open the Control Panel key
Open the Desktop key

Step 3)
In the right pane, select the AutoEndTasks value
Change the value to 1 to automatically end hung applications
A value of 0 is the default and prompts the user for the next step

Reboot the system for the setting to take effect.

Alternatively, you could kill the explorer.exe process in task manager then click File on the menu and select New Task (run). Enter explorer.exe in the dialog box and pres Enter. This will force Windows to stop and upon restarting re-read the registry.