One problem with upgrading software remotely is that you often need to stop the software you are upgrading first. Often, there is no service that can be stopped. The process must be killed. This can be a bit nasty with Windows systems because there is no easy way to find all instances of a particular program. Another problem is the lack of command-line utilities to deal with local and remote processes. There are some limited utilities that come with the Windows 2000 Resource Kit. Better, still, there is a cool set of free utilities available from Sysinternals that will, among other things, list processes and kill all processes matching a certain name.

Let’s list the processes running on this XP box:

Pstools>pslist
PsList v1.12 - Process Information Lister
Copyright (C) 1999-2000 Mark Russinovich
Systems Internals - http://www.sysinternals.com
Process information for DIVINE:
Name         Pid ...  Elapsed Time
Idle           0     ...  0:00:00.000
System         4       0:00:00.000
smss         4483   43:32:18.794
csrss        496    43:32:14.856
winlogon     520 43:32:14.638
services     564  43:32:14.309
.
.
.
devldr32    1424  41:09:30.249
cmd         1920     0:00:53.718
IEXPLORE    1996  0:00:30.062
IEXPLORE     832   0:00:04.953
pslist       308    0:00:00.093

OK. Let’s kill all instances of IEXPLORE:

Pstools>pskill IEXPLORE
PsKill v1.03 - local and remote process killer
Copyright (C) 2000 Mark Russinovich
http://www.sysinternals.com
2 processes named IEXPLORE killed.
Pstools>

All gone. Nice. There are many other utilities related to processes, event logs, and shutdown/reboot in Pstools. Not only do these utilities work for local machines, you can also use them to manage remote machines. Do check it out.