How to pause / resume any external process under Windows?

Question

I am looking for different ways to pause and resume programmatically a particular process via its process ID under Windows XP.

Process suspend/resume tool does it wi

Answer 1

If you "debug the debugger" (for instance, using logger.exe to trace all API calls made by windbg.exe), it appears that the debugger uses SuspendThread()/ResumeThread() to suspend all of the threads in the process being debugged.

PsSuspend may use a different way of suspending processes (I'm not sure), but it is still possible to hang other processes: if the process you're suspending is holding a shared synchronization object that is needed by another process, you may block that other process from making any progress. If both programs are well-written, they should recover when you resume the one that you suspended, but not all programs are well-written. And if this causes your program that is doing the suspending to hang, then you have a deadlock.