Closing Windows 11’s Task Manager accidentally opens up more copies of Task Manager

One of the reasons to use Task Manager in Windows is to see if any of the applications running on your computer are misbehaving or using a disproportionate amount of resources. But what to do when the misbehaving app is Task Manager itself?

After a recent Windows Update, some users (including Windows Latest) noticed that closing the Task Manager window failed to close the application, leaving the executable running in memory. Even more worrying, every time you open Task Manager, it spawns a new process on top of the old one, which you can repeat virtually endlessly (or until your PC buckles under the strain).

Each instance of Task Manager occupies approximately 20 MB of system RAM and fluctuates between 0 and 2% CPU utilization. If you only have a handful of instances open, you are unlikely to notice a significant performance impact. But if you use Task Manager frequently or go a long time between reboots, opening two or three dozen copies of the process that are all intermittently using a fraction of your CPU can add up, causing a potentially significant impact on performance and battery life.