How do I get windows to ignore applications telling it not to go idle?

Question

Everything that comes up when I search for this is about how to prevent windows from going into an idle state.

I work in IT at a public library. We have software called PC Reservation that patrons use to use their library cards to sign into the computers. However, PC Reservation has a tendency to eventually crash after a day or two. I'm trying to set a task to restart the VMs after 12 hours of being idle, but since the task isn't being triggered, I believe that PC Res is flagging the system to not go idle while it's running.

How can I get windows to ignore applications telling it not to go idle? Or is there a way to go farther and have windows only define active user input via mouse/keyboard as something to keep it from going idle?

Answer 1

Got around this by having powershell on a remote server log into vsphere and reboot one VM per minute from a list after we close.