How Do I Kill All the iexplore.exe Processes at Once?
So you’ve looked in task manager, and there’s a dozen iexplore.exe processes listed! Clicking the End Process button for each will take far too long… so how can we kill them all in one step?
The answer is to use a quick command line utility that kills all the processes by name, though we’ll make it even easier for you and create a re-usable icon that will kill them in a single step. Of course, this same technique will work for any application that opens a dozen processes… like, for instance, Google Chrome.
For those that are wondering why we don’t just close the window, we’re trying to forcibly close them without leaving any stragglers behind, which seems to happen all too often.
Kill Multiple Processes From the Command Line
The first thing you’ll need to do is open up a command prompt, and then use the taskkill command with the following syntax:
taskkill /F /IM <processname.exe> /T
These parameters will forcibly kill any process matching the name of the executable that you specify. For instance, to kill all iexplore.exe processes, we’d use:
taskkill /F /IM iexplore.exe
It’s really as simple as that… the processes will immediately be killed.
Note that if you are using Windows Vista, you can only kill “normal mode” apps from a regular command prompt… if you want to kill an application running as administrator, you would need an administrator mode command prompt.
Create an Icon to Force Kill All iexplore.exe Processes
Since we don’t really want to drop to the command prompt every single time we want to recycle Internet Explorer or Chrome, we can setup an icon to do the work for us.
Right-click anywhere on the desktop and choose New \ Shortcut:
Paste in the following if you want to kill Internet Explorer, otherwise you can use a different executable in place of iexplore.exe.
taskkill.exe /F /IM iexplore.exe /T
Give the shortcut a useful name, and then open up the properties. Make sure to choose to Run as Minimized, and then you can select a more fitting icon… I chose the one that looks the most like recycling.
At this point you have an icon that will completely kill all running Internet Explorer windows. You could even have assigned a shortcut key…
Now that you’ve learned this technique, you can use it for all sorts of other useful things as well.
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Good tip, but you could use Process Explorer instead.
All these processes have one parent process – Process Explorer shows this as a tree.
Right click on the parent and choose ‘Kill process tree’, and they’re all gone!
You can set Process Explorer as your default task manager to make this even easier…
Dumb Question – how is this different from right clicking on the IE button in the task bar and choosing “Select All”?
And a related question – is there a way to kill all IE windows *except* the “base” window? Too often there are many windows open and I want to close all of them except the first one I opened.
Oops – how is this different from right clicking the tab in the task bar and selecting “Close Group”?
Doesn’t work for me. Is this for xp or Vista?
You could create a batch file that asks which process you want to kill too, that way you’d be able to kill any process you want and you have to create a new shortcut for each process. It would still be one click to fire it up, then just put the name of the process you want wacked, and away it goes. Little more efficient that way.
@Sidney
Actually, when I tested this in Process Explorer before writing the article, every iexplore.exe process showed up separately. Maybe it’s just a 64-bit thing, but it didn’t show in a hierarchy properly.
Really, this article was meant to explain how to kill multiple processes by name – using IE as the culprit was just an example.
i gotta kow to it could be done in .bat file also…..
I have Windows XP Home Edition. This doesn’t work for me.
Is this just for VISTA?
Ashok, same command. I’ve been using this with executor for ages – it integrates perfectly with my “heaviest processes” samurize section
as far as i.e. goes, the simplest and best solution is to never fire it up in the first place.
We had to create this as a batch because iexplore is hanging in the background. It looks like there is no iexplore.exe open (taskbar shows no exploerer) but the program did not close properly and is using a TON of resources while the computer grinds to a halt.
I think it is because we call to Iexplore.exe from our program and even though we close iexplore.exe it doesn’t shut down. I looked for many fruitless hours on WHY and decided the easier thing would be to create a bat file and tell the staff “click this when your computer is slow”
Our batch file looks like this:
//This batch file stops hidden iexplore.exe programs.
//It aslo stops any other iexplore programs
TASKKILL /IM IEXPLORE.EXE /F
P.S. Archer the most WORTHLESS post ever is to tell people “just don’t use the program” as an answer to the solution. Way to waste everyone’s time.
This article didn’t say how to restore iexplore after it’s trned off.
what you need is the nircmd!
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html
you can easily kill all iexplore-processes with one klick on the batch-file in which you’ve wrote the following (without the “”):
“nircmd.exe killprocess iexplore.exe”
you need to copy the nircmd.exe in the same folder like the batch-file or copy nircmd into the windows-dir.
This is useful for all kinds of things. I have been using acrobat 7 pro to scan in documents from a flatbed scanner and there is a process that is being created and left running after each page I scan, leaving potentially dozens of the same task open (depending on how many pages I’m scanning). This command will be very useful for me in this situation since I’ve been manually killing each one of those duplicate processes which has been time consuming and irritating.
Debilyn Gardner: you asked how to restore iexplore after it’s ‘turned off’. Just start up Internet Explorer again (the process iexplore.exe is the program name for Internet Explorer. If you’re closing explorer instead of iexplore then you’re shutting down Windows Explorer. To restart explorer if you shut it down, ust wait for a few seconds for it to start up on its own (up to 30 seconds sometimes) or, if it doesn’t on its own or you don’t want to wait, do the CTRL-ALT-DEL again to bring up task manager and under the Applications tab, click the New Task button and then type in explorer and click the Ok button and that will do it. You could also start up any other process (usually) this way, such as iexpore.exe.
wanzt: I’m sure the nircmd utilitiy is great but it’s even better when you can use a command that comes with windows and is already available than having to download a 3rd party utility that accomplishes the same thing. However, if taskkill isn’t available in xp home edition, then I can see where the nircmd utility would be a great thing to have.