Unfortunately as you can see here, the output is not very well formed. 🙂Īs you can see in the screenshot, this command will show you a listing of all processes that are using open network ports on the machine including the executable name and the process ID (PID). The “-bona” set of options is just what I remember the best it reminds of the “netstat -tuna” command line from my Unix days. Run “ netstat -?” for more information on the command line options. Simply fire up a command prompt and run “netstat -bona”: The application might not be properly cleaning up its network resources and thus the process simply lingers in the background, desperately clinging to the network socket(s) it opened until Windows decides a timeout has been reached, and the operating system closes the socket, thus letting the app finally exit.Īgain, every situation is unique, but here is a technique that can be handy if you get an explicit error message like “: Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted”, or if you just have that gut feeling that your application has a bug related to networking and is not closing its port/socket when asked to. While every application – and every bug – is unique, some times this situation can point to a bug in the application and its use of network resources. Then thirty to sixty seconds after you originally stopped the service, it quietly disappears from the Processes list. When you try to start another instance of the service, the new instance fails to start. The service either times out while stopping or even worse it, reports that it stopped successfully, but in either case you still see the process running in the Processes list in Task Manager.

Sometimes this can happen when an application doesn’t properly cleanup or close its network resources when it shuts down.Ī typical symptom of this issue is when you have an application that runs as a Windows Service and you try to stop that service. Just like when two applications try to acquire exclusive access to a local file or a shared file. When two or more applications try to acquire exclusive access to a network port, they can run into trouble.

What is tcpview and netstat used for