Automatically Kill Hanging Applications in Windows XP

Since applications will never be perfect, we have to deal with hanging applications once in a while. In Windows XP, applications are qualified as hanging based on their response time. After a certain period of non-responsiveness, Windows decides the application is hanging and informs the user of the problem.

In many cases you will simply decide to terminate the hanging application. Waiting for the application to respond will probably take more time than to kill the application and restart it.

So can Windows not do this for us? The answer is yes, we can indeed tell Windows to kill hanging applications automatically. The following steps tell you how to do this:

1. First start the Registry Editor. Select Run from the Windows Start menu and type regedit in the Run box.
2. In the Registry Editor, locate the following key:
   HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop
3. Now double-click the value WaitToKillAppTimeout.
4. In the Edit String dialog box, type a value for the timeout. This value is in milliseconds, so typing a value of 1000 means that hanging applications will be terminated after 1 second.

Note: Be carefull with the timeout value you specify. As short value will give faster windows, because applications do not make the computer slow anymore, but applications that really need some processing time might be terminated for the wrong reason.