Sometimes as an IT Support administrator you may need to kill a service which is stuck at stopping in order to avoid having to reboot a server in the middle of the day.
Heres what you need to do:
Step 1. Find out the Service Name
To do this, go in to services and double click on the service which has stuck. Make a note of the Service Name.
Step 2. Find out the PID of the service
Open an elevated command prompt and type in:
sc queryex servicename
[where servicename is the name of the service you obtained from Step 1.]
Make note of the PID
Step 3. Kill the PID
From the same command prompt type in:
taskkill /f /pid [PID]
Where [PID] is the service number.
If it is successful you should receive the following message:
SUCCESS: The process with PID XXXX has been terminated.
Be careful of what you are killing though. If you kill a critical windows service you may end up forcing the machine to reboot on it own.
Note: By forcing a service to stop you can also use these instructions to Kill a Windows Service which is stuck at starting as well. This will allow you to restart the service.