Any tool to view Background Processes?

hi brothers,

This is the problem i m facing. In some systems (win 98/Me) in our lab whenever we press tab or Enter in text box (usually login page or search text box) the cursor does not move to the next textbox. Everything hangs for a few seconds.

Msconfig does not show anything strange in startup.

CTRL + ALT +DEL also do not show anything strange.But i have heard that some windows api's can hide the programs from appearing in the Close Program dialog box.What could be wrong? Does anyone know some software to monitor the tasks working in the background?

Process Explorer

Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded.

The Process Explorer display consists of two sub-windows. The top always shows a list of the currently active processes, including the names of their owning accounts, whereas the information displayed in the bottom window depends on the mode that Process Explorer is in: if it is in handle mode you’ll see the handles that the process selected in the top window has opened; if Process Explorer is in DLL mode you’ll see the DLLs and memory-mapped files that the process has loaded. Process Explorer also has a powerful search capability that will quickly show you which processes have particular handles opened or DLLs loaded.

These people appear to have a pretty nice product (never used this), but as far as I can tell you have to pay for it to use it...
http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintasksstd/

/nebulus

You can use "TC Active" program which has come with "the cleaner" www.moosoft.com
OR "File Monitor" http://www.sysinternals.com/win9x/98utilities.shtml

At second URL, you could find other usefull tools for your propose too.

Cheers

Couldnt you just look at the "process" tab after you C-A-D? This might just be later versions of Windows....it should tell you every process and its CPU utilization/page faults/etc...

-Xe

The processes tab is not included in Windows 9x

You may also use WinTop that comes with Windows Kernel Toys available for free at http://www.microsoft.com/windows95/d...oy/Default.asp

This sill list all running processes includeing system processes.

If you see something listed that you are unsure about you can check it out at http://www.lafn.org/webconnect/mento...p/PENINDEX.HTM

They list virtualy anything you will see in your task list. And give an explanaation as to why it is there and what it does.

When a program hides itself from the task list provided with CTRL-ALT-DEL it has registered itself as a system process. The reason for doing this normaly is because the program is critical to the operation of windows and if the user were to shut it down windows would start to do funny things or possibly stal. So to prevent users from shuting down the program, it is registered as a system process and becomes hidden.

This technique has also been used by Trojans to hide themself to avoid detection.

To learn more about this topic you should read up about Windows API hooking.

On Win9x, processes which use the RegisterServiceProcess API in kernel32.dll are invisible on ctrl-alt-del and not terminated on logoff, as documented here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...5func_3t0z.asp

As previous posters do mention, both Wintop and Process Explorer can see these processes. Neither will allow you to kill them AFAIK, but some tools like some win9x versions of PS and KILL will.

As Unl3Ashed said, the Sysinternals website is great. They have a lot of useful tools there. I use a few of them on a daily basis. Also, great link aj, I will have to bookmark the one for the list of processes. :D

I would highly recommend "Another Task Manager". I've been using v2.2 for quite a while, it's very handy, views all processes, kills threads, kills processes, changes priority, hide/unhide windows, can send mouseclicks and things... Check it out. BTW, it seems the official site doesn't have download links or something... either that or it doesn't display right in Opera... and I think the author was last working on a non-freeware version.