Terminal Services in XP/2K .. or 'Help, my process list is blank in the new beta!'

During 'real world' testing it was discovered that many users disable the service: Terminal Services. This service facilitates Fast User Switching, Remote Desktop, Media Center, and generally most all multi-user functions on the system. It takes very little resources and its default state is to start on-demand. I therefore strongly recommend you enable it, as it isn't going to make your PC run faster to disable it. The overhead is simply too low. I mean, heck, one browsing tab open for 1 second exceeds the total virtual memory and CPU use of that service for probably the life of the session (until reboot).

Anyway, in v4 RC1 BETA since I now better hide/show the processes of other users based on the configuration, the disabling of Terminal Services could result in a blank Process Lasso process list. You can simply toggle 'Main / Manage process of other users too...' to fix this. Alternatively, you can enable Terminal Services.

So, in the NEXT beta... What I'm going to do is continue to ALLOW people to DISABLE Terminal Services, as I know no matter what I say some will insist on being able to disable it. The one side effect is that it will be impossible for Process Lasso to resolve the user name of a process, because it has no session to match the process name to. Therefore, the option 'Manage processes of other users' will automatically be turned on when Terminal Services is found to be disabled.

This does not apply to Vista or Windows 7 where this service has become an integral part of the OS and is always going to be available.

So, now Process Lasso (as before) will continue be the ONLY utility of its kind that does NOT mandate the following services:

1. Performance Counter (yes, I carefully crafted code to not utilize this 'easy' way)
2. Terminal Services (in XP/2K if not present, we'll just 'deal' with not being able to get process usernames)

I am currently testing a new beta that will better handle this condition in XP and W2K. So, if you are one of those users who insists on having services disabled, that's no problem for us ;). I honestly think it is largely ineffectual to disable services, and likely to cause troubles with applications that may depend on them, but I will let you be the judge of that yourself.

This issue does NOT apply to last final (v3.84) where we simply managed all processes we had access to. With the improvements in Vista+ support, v4 was more picky about what processes it managed -- hence the little bug in the beta.