It's been bugging me for a while now, and I can't find a solution anywhere else.

Whenever I'm playing a Valve game that uses hl2.exe, or Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer (iw3mp.exe), and I go to close the game, it goes to desktop and appears to have closed, but if I go to task manager and processes, the .exe is still there using around 200mb of RAM. If I try to close it then I just get an "Process could not be terminated.Access is denied" error.

Sometimes when I'm playing Counter Strike: Source and close it, the game stops responding and just hangs at a black screen with hl2.exe still running.

Anyone have any ideas?

I don't know about CoD4 (I have the game but have not yet installed it) but with Valve games there appears to be a brief time after you close a game that it searches the Valve website for Steam News or promos to display. Will it go away after say, 20 or 30 seconds?

Agree with mailpup. Valve has HL2.exe stay open for a short period of time immediately after closing any Steam app.

No, it stays there until I restart my computer manually.

I think I've fixed it for cod4, been playing it today and closed it a few times with the .exe closing at the same time.

Turned out it was to do with my sound drivers, must be the crappy c-media Vista drivers that came with the sound card I bought, so I took the sound card out and cleaned the drivers from my PC, and then enabled my on-board sound, which uses Vista HD sound drivers (and it actually sounds better than the c-media card).

Not sure if this fixes the hl2.exe, will have a look tomorrow.


Cheers,