I had a problem today that I have not seen before.

I am running Windows 7, 64 bit. I had a document open in Word. The version of Word I use 2010 and, following Microsoft’s recommendation, I am using the x32, or 32 bit, version. I was scrolling through the document and it froze. I have had all sorts of applications freeze in the past, even some of my own. Or is that especially some of my own?

The usual fix is to open TaskManager, or in my case Process Explorer, which is part of the Sysinternals suite. Right click the process, in this case, Winword, and select Kill Process. It didn’t work.

So I tried taskkill from the command line. Didn’t work. So I tried taskkill /F, which is supposedly a forceful task kill. Still didn’t work. Back to sysinternals and tried its pskill, which is supposed to kill a process. And that didn’t work.

This has never happened before.

So I did a reboot. Now when right click the system tray and select Task Manager, or do the same from a Ctrl-Alt-Del, I get an error message.

I have no idea what is going wrong, but I can see I have some things to fix.