If found an intriguing app, TrayKiller, that may satisfy a variety of
requests from the last few months: John Corliss' "Need a way to close
a group of programs." (for a broadband connection); John Latter's
similar question; replacement for PC Mag's EndItAll; etc. I was
intrigued because it supports multiple configuration files and can
both open and close programs (the latter is awkward from a batch
file). The Borland C++ Builder source code was released for
non-commercial reuse in May.

Site short description: "TrayKiller is an application for MS Windows
(including windows XP) that let's you configure groups of programs to
start and stop by toggling an icon in the system tray. It's useful for
quickly killing background processes before you do cpu intensive
operations like burning cds or capturing video, and then restarting
them when you are done."

TrayKiller has not been mentioned for a couple of years. In 2001
Blinky said "it's way cool, and way flexible. Four and a half
SharkFins out
of five; if it could kill NAV, it'd get 4.7 (nobody's perfect)." In a
later email he said "it's a *lot* more featured, flexible and
configurable than I
expected it to be."

What do you think about it now, Blinky? What (combination?) are other
people using for similar tasks on your Win OS?

"TrayKiller runs on Microsoft Windows 95 / 98 / ME / NT / 2000 / XP ,
is about 1.5 mb, and is free."

Includes links to manual, screenshots, and downloads links.

http://www.students.uiuc.edu/~reichl...ler/index.html

BillR

Site long description:
---------
Most people have quite a few processes/programs that start-up
automatically with windows and run in the background on their
computer. These programs provide extra functionality but can slow down
your computer. Most of the time this is not an issue of concern, but
occassionally you want to have your computer running at top speed,
such as when playing games, burning a cdrom, or capturing video. In
these cases, it is desirable to shut down all non-essential programs.
TrayKiller automates this process, and can automatically restart the
programs when you are done with the processor intensive task.

TrayKiller resides in your system tray and can be toggled, with a
double-click of your mouse, between two states, an On state and an Off
state. When toggling into the On state, TrayKiller activates a set of
programs you specify. When toggling into the Off state, TrayKiller
searches for and terminates a set of programs you specify.

TrayKiller can also be configured as a more flexible replacement for
the ctrl-alt-delete box, allowing you to interactively select which
running processes to shut down, or run in batch mode to
non-interactively search for and terminate a list of processes and
then shut down.

You can run multiple instances of TrayKiller simultaneously using
different configuration files, allowing you to easily start and stop
different groups of programs, and each configuration file can be
customized with your own icon sets. Each configuration file can be
individually configured to load automatically when windows starts.