[Bug Report] One Instance mode in Process Explorer sometimes doesn't work

Question

I enabled One Instance mode through "Options" -> "Allow Only One Instance" in Process Explorer (I'm using the latest version v16.32). I also enabled the "Replace Task Manager" so the "Ctrl + Shift + Esc" shortcut key will launch the process explorer. I'm using windows 7 64 bit.

The problem is sometimes when I press the "Ctrl + Shift + Esc", two process explorer instances will be launched instead.

It isn't straightforward to reproduce the issue, you have to press the "Ctrl+Shift+Esc" by holding it a bit and then release it. You might have to try this many times until you see two instances of process explorer being launched. But I found out by pressing "Ctrl+Shift+Esc" two times in short interval seems to have a bigger chance to produce the issue.

I had confirmed the keyboard isn't the issue as I had tested it with different keyboards which gave same results.

Answer 1

Did you disabled DDE on your system???

Most of the Sysinternals tools uses DDE to speak each other and to decide when in case like this you opted to have only one instance of the program, so if DDE is disabled they cannot talk each other and chance are high that if you continue to press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC you will end up with a huge number of Process Explorer instances..

Or may be that you were so quick that the first instance has not yet been completely initialized, so it was unable to answer to the request from the second instance and you ended up with two Procexp instances.

HTH
-mario

Answer 2

DDE is the Dynamic Data Exchange... an old Windows technology for interprocess communication..

Another possible reason is the Antivirus interfering with the process.

One possible solution is to expand the 64 bit version in the same folder of the 32 bit and in the registry as Taskman replacement point directly to the 64 bits version..

No longer two version starting and no longer whatsoever was going on :-)

HTH
-mario