"Launch" vs "shell" vs "open process" against close and kill

[Havanna]

For unpleasant reasons I tried to make a wrapper that does no more but "on opencard" launch a windows (32 bit) program.
I has a button to kill/close/shutdown that same program.

Now I can get this program to run only with get shell("winprog.exe"), launch or open process just don't do anything (they work though with different windows executables).
Same for termination: close or kill won't finish up my winprog, but they work for other executables.

Anyone got a clue?

[WaltBrown]

One idea: check out "taskkill -?" from the Win command line.

[Havanna]

Thx, Waltbrown.
Taskkill indeed shuts it down, with /f /t (forcibly and with child processes), no traces left, no process kept running, no filelocks whatsoever.
Now I get a fresh stumbler: The whole runs dirctly from cdrom, all fine that far. But after taskkill Windows refuses to open the cd tray. No way but OS Restart or brute force!

[WaltBrown]

Can you look at and kill the child processes selectively?

[Havanna]

Can you look at and kill the child processes selectively?

Yes (procexp), but that makes no difference.
I've also copied the whole stuff to a HD directory and started from there. After killing the application I deleted that whole directory, hoping to get a lock error - no beef. Very unhappy.

[mwieder]

Hmmm... it's been a while since I've had to deal with Windows, but it sounds a bit like the parent process that launched the executable might still be running, and so that would be preventing unmounting the drive it's running from.

Does your shell command return an error?