I have unusable and unkillable background instances of Steam and
Borderless Gaming.
I have tried task manager (ofc), taskkill (forced), and Process Hacker 2, but every time I get "Access Denied" messages because either "there is no process running" or because I "tried to access an exiting process" - which I believe means the processes think they're in the middle of shuttin down.
I've looked for a few hours on what to do but nothing worked. I found Process Hacker 2's terminator stuff that basically try to brute force a process' shutdown, but I really don't wanna risk that breakin things. I've also seen some other stuff that give unrestricted access to a program to try to kill processes, but I would really rather not.
These invisible zombie processes have survived multiple shutdowns and restarts. They make me lag and stutter right after I join a server. They go away after like a minute but it's still a problem I wanna fix.
I considered reinstalling Steam but I wanted to see if there were other options & I figure if I can't kill them now, Steam wouldn't be able to either.
Can provide screenshots of stuff I tried. Any help is appreciated, ty :D
For future reference, I disabled steam as a startup program, booted into safemode and the processes didn't start up, booted regularly and they stayed dead.