Windows only 
There are all kinds of free applications that will let you do things like adjust a window’s transparency, minimize it to the System Tray, and pin a window so that it remains on top of all others. Process Manager is a little different since it will also let you kill a program, change it’s priority, or hide it so that it doesn’t appear at all. It does all of this simply by right-clicking on the item in the Taskbar.
When this open source project first started out the main focus was on killing and changing the running priority of Windows from the Taskbar. As you can see in the screenshots below they added a bunch more options to help make this more of an all-in-one solution. After all, features like minimizing to the System Tray are becoming quite popular.
(Click to Enlarge)
Over the lifetime of the project it’s been downloaded under 150 times (update: about 10,000 downloads), and definitely hasn’t received the publicity it deserves. It’s a simple and productive solution that is sure to save you some time if you ever need to forcibly kill programs. The other added features are just a bonus from my point of view.
Process Manager Homepage [via Control Center]
Thanks Saurabh for the tip!
I don’t know where you got that “under 150″ downloads. It was covered by Lifehacker back in November ( [lifehacker.com]+click ), and received just under 6,000 downloads that month:
[sourceforge.net]
I’ve been running AnVir Task Manager to get something similar: instead of the “hide” and “kill” options, you get “resize”, “always minimize to tray”, and “create floating icon”. The tray icon(s) allow for wonderfully flexible and powerful resource monitoring, and it’s a supercharged task manager that rivals Process Explorer. If you don’t want all that overhead (34MB RAM), Process Manager is certainly just fine, and the option to kill the process is a big advantage.
Great find! Love the kill and process priority options, though I wonder if I can even reach them when I need to access them. Usually ctrl+alt+delete works better because the task manager gets a higher task priority by default, and the right-click menu does not.
Huh… that is definitely the same stats page I checked. Sourceforge must have been having troubles when I looked it up, because I know the data did not look like that.
There is no 64 bit version
A similar program that ive found as useful is “DAPHNE”. It too is open source.
Made me remember about “nice” and “renice” in Linux!
that’s nice tips. i’ll try it..
thx..
And indeed, after some experience with this piece of software, the kill option is not accessible because the right-click menu does not popup when an application is stuck
Pity.