Closing Zone Alarm and Pc-cillin

[Diggy18]

Hi everyone!

I'm a noob at this. I'm trying to make a script that will shut down a few apps running in the system tray in order to free up some memory. The apps to be shut down are:

1. Outlook

2. Internet Connection

3. Pc-cillin

4. Zone Alarm

I think that I have the first two figured out ok, but the third is a bit tricky and the fourth has me stumped.

Pc-cillin usually has five processes running. I can make the ProcessClose command work only for one of them, which is the only one that stops if I right click the system tray icon and choose to stop the real time monitoring. Optimally, I'd like to stop all of the processes. (Three of the other services are for updating the virus definitions and getting some kind of 'new virus' alert.) Anybody have any experience with closing all the processes associated with this program?

Zone Alarm usually has two processes running. I can't get ProcessClose to work on either of them. The command appears to run, ie there is no error message anywhere, but the process is still listed in the task manager. However, if I right click the system tray icon, there is an option to "Shut Down" Zone Alarm. This does stop both processes. The problem is that Window Spy does not seem to be seeing this option! Anybody know how to kill Zone Alarm using Autoit?

I guess both Zone Alarm and Pc-cillin were designed to make it difficult to completely shut down, huh?

[emmanuel]

I guess both Zone Alarm and Pc-cillin were designed to make it difficult to completely shut down, huh?

huh. yeah, that's funny. Firewall and antivirus that are hard to automatically shut down... You're not the first to try, at least with zone alarm, you might want to search the forums on that... I don't think they ever got it to work.

[thijzzz]

closing antivirus programs is easy.

just look at how you close it manually, and then let AutiIt repeat that.

or ask any virus-writer.

[Nova]

I had this problem before, I wasnt able to close a process with autoit using processclose ,but I was able to kill the task using taskkill !

If ur running winxp try

RunWait(@ComSpec & " /c " & 'taskkill /f /im processname.exe ', "", @SW_HIDE)

[Diggy18]

Hey thanks for the tip. I'm running XP Home, and it seems that taskkill.exe is not included in Home.

I can shutdown the Pc-cillin processes from the task manager, but the Zone Alarm processes won't shut down even if I hit "End Process" from the task manager. I just get an "Access Denied" error.

ANyybody know of a place to download the taskkill utility? I looked on Google but didn't see one . . .

[this-is-me]

If you get access denied, that means that the process is a service or your user account does not have the rights to end that process. Check if your user account is an administrator account.

[Nova]

I'm running XP Home, and it seems that taskkill.exe is not included in Home

Woops I completly forgot that taskkill dosent come with xp home,I use it all the time its a great little feature of xppro.

Ok if it turns out to be a service ,find out what its name is from computer management

To open computer management right click my computer and select manage then find the list of services.

To stop that service use

RunWait(@ComSpec & " /c " & net stop servicename', "", @SW_HIDE)

Edited:

This is just a cleaner way so as cmd only try's to end the service if its actually running, helps stop possible errors !

$checkser = RunWait(@comspec & ' /c net start | find "Service Name"','',@SW_HIDE)

if $checkser <> 0 Then
 
Else
  RunWait(@ComSpec & " /c " & net stop servicename', "", @SW_HIDE)
EndIf

Edited July 29, 2004 by nova

[Diggy18]

Hey thanks I'll try that. I think I'll be able to use that code to shut down the Pc-cillin processes that don't respond to "ProcessClose". They're listed as services.

But that Zone Alarm is a bugger. One of the processes, VSMON.exe, is listed inthe services.msc thing, but the options to both stop and restart it are grayed out.

And one more thing. Uh , since I'm new at this, I couldn't get that code to work. I'm not sure where to put the quotes to "close the string", to quote from the error message.

EDIT: No wait, I got the quotes right now.

Edited July 29, 2004 by Diggy18

[emmanuel]

RunWait(@ComSpec & " /c " & 'net stop servicename', "", @SW_HIDE)

just missing a little quote...

[Diggy18]

Yeah it works for the Pc-cillin services!

So there are different commands to use for a process running as a service and a "regular" process, interesting!

(It won't stop the VSMON - I'll have to check on their help forums.)

[sugi]

There are no different commands. You just do not have enough rights to close programs running as a different user.

An AutoIt script running as systemuser would be able to send other system programs the command to close.

But you should still use the services interface (either the control panel, services.msc, net start/stop or sc.exe command) because windows then knows that a program is supposed to terminate and will not take actions to restart the program (the actions depend on the configuration of the service. even a forced reboot or a bluescreen is possible).

[Diggy18]

From what I gather from the Zone Alarm forums, there is an option to protect the ZA exe from another program simulating mouseclicks and key strokes. If that protection is on then AU3 can't shut it down. (I guess)