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Critical System Services

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Critical system services cannot be stopped and restarted by the Restart Manager without a system restart. Updates to any file or resource in use by one of these services requires a system restart.

To determine whether a process is a critical system service.

  1. Register the process using the RmRegisterResources function.
  2. Call the RmGetList function to get the RM_PROCESS_INFO structure.
  3. The ApplicationType member of the returned RM_PROCESS_INFO structure contains a RM_APP_TYPE enumeration value. This value is set to RmCritical for a critical system process.

Critical system services include smss.exe, csrss.exe, wininit.exe, logonui.exe, lsass.exe, services.exe, winlogon.exe, System, svchost.exe with RPCSS, and svchost.exe with Dcom/PnP.