Nice job musik,
As an administrator I want to add a few things to this.
First all developers should follow musik's advice and always try to run web application dlls in COM+. Seeing that lazy programmers do not do this, and force administrators to come in and fix their mess, here are a few tips for those unlucky administrators (like me) who have to clean up this mess without stopping web services.
If you go to Task Manager and look at it while your web application is in use, it will show up as dllhost.exe. To verify, in Task Manager go to View | Select Columns | and choose User Name. The username will be IWAM_MachineName next to the DLLhost.exe process.
What we do to kill these rogue applications while services are up is simple, If you run all COM+ applications under their own Domain Account specific to the application (which you should be doing for Security purposes anyway), only web applications not running in COM+ will show up under IWAM dllhost.exe in Task Manager. You can even go further detailed using Process Explorer utilities to determine exactly which dllhost.exe is which if you have multiple applications running out of COM+ on the same server.
In the end though, once you have determined exactly what process is your rogue application, you can use Kill.exe (available in the Resource Kit or online at
to kill that individual process.
It is brute force and dirty, but it is the way to get rid of problems without having to restart services. In the end though, force your deverloper to follow musik's advice and in the long run, both your server and that application will be more stable (and more secure).
Galrahn
galrahn@galrahn.com