I had a weird task manager problem while copying files to my NAS.  When I open Task Manager to look at my network utilization, the little Taskman load bar appears in the bottom right, as expected.  But, it flickers like a bat out of hell.  Clicking and right-clicking on it does not do anything. 

I figured taskman might be off screen, so I tried to do the little trick on moving off-screen windows (read how here), but I couldn’t get any options to come up.  I tried to resize my desktop, but all desktop personalization options wouldn’t show.  A reboot didn’t help either.

I need to kill the task manager, but I can’t access through the gui.  So what do you do when the GUI fails you?  Go into the command line!

I had to go to the command prompt (type cmd.exe in a Run dialog).  Then type “tasklist” to bring up a list of all running processes.  Sure enough, taskman.exe was in the list.  I took note of the process id (in this case 4397), and then ran taskkill to kill the process, like so…

taskkill /pid 4397

The hung process immediately  stopped, and task manager was visible again.  The Desktop Management windows that were hung also appeared.

Hopefully this little tip will help someone overcome some goofy problem that can’t be resolved using the Windows GUI.