Stop a windows stucked/hung service Posted on February 16, 2012 by dpejic If you ever have trouble with a service being stuck in a ‘starting’ or ‘stopping’ state, you can run a couple of simple commands to kill the service. 1. Query the process To kill the service you have to know its PID or Process ID. To find this just type the following in at a command prompt: sc queryex servicename <Enter> Replace ‘servicename’ with the services registry name. For example: Print Spooler is spooler. (See Picture) 2. Identify the PID After running the query you will by presented with a list of details. You will want to locate the PID. (Highlighted) 3. Run the Taskkill command Now that you have the PID, you can run the following command to kill the hung process: taskkill /f /pid [PID] <Enter> This will force kill the hung service. (See Picture)