My symptoms are as follows:
1. Cannot run Google Chrome; Task Manager tells me there are a single chrome.exe sitting in RAM, and the Task Manager cannot kill it:
2. Since the process is still in RAM, I cannot reinstall the Google Chrome:
Any help is much appreciated!
You can use the command prompt to terminate the process:
Restarting your computer would take care of the RAM issue.. from there, you should be able to uninstall chrome no problem. As for not being able to kill the chrome processes in task manager, that seems like a permissions thing.
Additionally, it might be beneficial for you to disable all chrome plugins and extensions, and check again if you can kill any chrome tasks with task manager. If that doesn't solve it, try to clear your browser cache.
Restart your computer to fix the RAM issue, then try to reinstall chrome, if there is some process running on it then run task manager as administrator and then kill those processes.
@Aayush Sethi answer should solve your problem.
For completion, I might add my personal app that I wrote based on the same concept Aayush wrote.
Source: https://github.com/AndreiLucaci/killapp
Binary: https://github.com/AndreiLucaci/killapp/releases/download/v1.0.0/KillApp.exe
The TASKKILL command didn't work for me, I got the same "access denied" error posted above. I found another solution using the System Configuration tool, which describes how to disable services from running when you reboot. I disabled the Google services before rebooting again, and that was the only thing that worked. I was finally able to uninstall Chrome with no errors, no phantom Google Chrome windows open. It's detailed here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/929135/how-to-perform-a-clean-boot-in-windows
