
What do you do when a program stops working in Windows?
It happens to everyone from time to time: a program just stops responding. It doesn’t necessarily mean there’s any great problem, but you can’t do any more with it until you dismiss it and start again.
If you don’t know a better way, you probably close down the entire computer and start again. Tedious, but it will probably work.
Close a frozen program via the Task Manager
A more sophisticated way is to start the Windows “Task Manager” (with Control, Shift, and Escape), find and select the culprit, click on “End task”, and then close the Task Manager. This will be quicker than re-starting the computer and will leave the other open programs untouched.
However, it can sometimes be a bit tricky finding the correct task to close and there are sometimes several tasks relating to the same program.
Enabling “end task” in Windows 11
In Windows 11 you can close a frozen program from the taskbar, but it’s switched off by default and you are not likely to stumble on it by chance.
Follow these steps to enable “end task” in Windows 11:
- Open Settings with the Windows key and letter “i”
- Click on the “System” option at the left
- Click on the “For Developers” box
- Against the entry “End Task”, slide the switch rightwards to “on”
- Close Settings
Using “end task” in Windows 11
Now, when a program freezes, right-click on its entry in the taskbar (at the bottom of the screen) and left-click on “End task”.

Use “end task” to close a frozen program from the taskbar wisely
A word of caution, though. Don’t use this as your default way of closing a program. Only use it when a program freezes. To close a program in the normal way, you can left-click on the “Close window” option directly below “End task”.
Using the “End task” option could cause you to lose any data file that the program has open. Also, ending a task this way might mean that neither the program nor Windows has an opportunity to reset anything that was set when the program was opened.
This new option only became available in the July update to Windows. See this article in Laptop Mag for more information on the specific build of Windows that you need.
For more about the taskbar in Windows 11, see “Windows 11 taskbar”
Image designed by David Leonard with Microsoft Designer
Screenshots from Windows 11