Making sure programs fully shut down

[traderNik]

Lately I've been using a bunch of programs that keep running even though you 'exit' them, like Skype for instance. If you click 'Control - Alt - Delete' after exiting Skype, you find that it's still running.

Is there a downloadable utility that will let me say 'When I close Skype, make sure that it fully shuts down'? I am assuming that this can't be done using msconfig.

Thanks

[Hairball]

Try killing off the Skype service and it should shut down for good.

I imagine that's how the application runs, so it's "always on". Or see if there are application settings you can change.

[traderNik]

Hey hairball

So you mean manually killing it using Control-Alt-Delete to open Task Manager, right?

If that's what you mean, yeah I'm killing it like that right now but I want to know if there's a program that I can tell to kill it when I shut the program down.

Is that what you meant?

I was about to open it up and see if I could control the shutdown behaviour as you suggested. I'll try that.

[Seiphas]

The programs put icons in your system tray. There should be an option in the program so that when you click the X button, close the window and the process. Otherwise, just go to the tray, click an icon, and hit close.

[traderNik]

Ok, thanks Seiphas. I tried a general Google search for 'managing program closure' and similar terms, but I guess I'll have to start doing specific searches for each program. I knew that the icon appears in the system tray but what I'm looking to avoid is having to go to the system tray every time I want to make sure a program is closed. It seems more and more of these programs don't like to close when you ask them to.

I tried configuring Skype to do this but there doesn't seem to be any way to ask it to completely shut down when you click the X.

EDIT: Just try to find a Google result that addresses the issue of Skype running in the background!

[Hairball]

The programs put icons in your system tray. There should be an option in the program so that when you click the X button, close the window and the process. Otherwise, just go to the tray, click an icon, and hit close.

Did you go to the processes tab and kill the Skype.exe (or whatever it's called), that would shut it down.

I think I said services, I may be mistaken, I'm not sure if it's a service or a process.

[traderNik]

Did you go to the processes tab and kill the Skype.exe (or whatever it's called), that would shut it down.

I think I said services, I may be mistaken, I'm not sure if it's a service or a process.
Yes, I did that. What I am looking to do is avoid doing that every time I launch the program and want to shut it down. I was hoping to find a utility that I could use to exit Skype (and a bunch of other programs that annoyingly continue to run after I close them) completely when I click the X.