Killing A Process Safely...

Anyone who has ever done any real scripting in Windows knows there are about a million different ways to kill a process.

However, be it VBScript or PowerShell there is only really one "safe" way (not including heavily complicated .Net calls in PS):

taskkill /t /pid <pid>

A couple of quick details. /t tell it to "treekill", or in other words kill all child processes as well (which is pretty crucial when killing virtual apps as their child processes hold the virtual environment open).

/pid is pretty self explanatory, you can find a processes PID pretty easily:

$proc = Get-Process -ProcessName WINWORD

$proc.ID

$proc.ID should contain the PID for the WINWORD process, in my case it was 344, so the resultant safe-kill command (which WILL prompt the user to save any unsaved documents) would be:

taskkill /t /pid 344

Programattically you can then have the script wait, check to see if the process still exists (after, say, 30-60 seconds for the user to save their files if they so choose), and then proceed from their, either moving on to whever task was at hand if it is stopped, or force killing the process if it is still running.