How do I (administrator) gracefully close a window process running in another user session using powershell on Windows 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services

Question

If I run the following command in my session...

(Get-Process -Id $pid).CloseMainWindow()

I am able to gracefully shut down a process (no modal windows or other popups arise).

If, however, the pid is in another user's session on the same machine (running RDS), the process does not close, and CloseMainWindow() returns FALSE (it returns TRUE if it's running in my own session). It also works if I run the powershell from the other user's session.

I specifically need a way to gracefully shut down the program as the program has a few important cleanup actions required to keep its database in order. So stop-process or process.kill() will not work.

Answer 1

After lengthy research, it does not seem possible to do this. There is, however, a solution which met at least some of my requirements.

You can create a Windows Scheduled Task which is triggered on session disconnect . This allows you to run a cleanup job as the user , rather than as the administrator, which allows programs to exit gracefully.

It has two major drawbacks....

1. It is called even if the user just has a minor network interruption (so you have to build a wait() function in the script to sleep for a bit and then check if it is still disconnected - not a clean solution.

2. It isn't called during a log-off event. For that you need to use a logoff script triggered by GPO.

Hope this helps someone in the future.