I ran into a big problem today on with my Windows XP machine. I was scanning something and OmniPage just went into a tailspin. It was eating 100% of the CPU and I couldn't get it to stop. It was hung. Normally, I would just get frustrated and reboot the machine, but I was actually doing something else in the background that I wanted to finish.
I thought, "No problem! I'll just bring up the Task Manager and kill it." Sounded good. But didn't work!
I read some more web pages and decided I should be able to do it from a command prompt. Learned about "tasklist" and "taskkill". Neither worked. Both aborted with some cryptic error about "server execution" or something that didn't make sense.
Then I found this and life was good. I don't even know what "ntsd" is. But it worked great to kill the unkillable OmniPage process.
I figure I won't remember this the next time I need it unless I write it somewhere.