Windows 10: Processes stuck in "Suspended" state

I'm running into an issue on Windows 10 where processes remain stuck in the "Suspended" state (visible through the task manager by displaying the "Status" column). Those processes cannot be killed, even with SYSTEM user rights, as Taskkill returns an "Access Denied" error.

When a process is suspended, the locks it has on the Dlls it references are not freed. This becomes problematic if another application attempts to update those Dlls.

Another problematic scenario: if an application is in charge of ensuring that another application is always running, doing API calls to detect running processes returns an exception (for suspended processes).

Here's a 100% repro: create a small .net console application that throws an exception and run it through the command line. The process will become suspended and cannot be terminated.

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(args[0]))
        {
        }
    }
}

Anyone else encountered a similar issue ? I know that suspending processes is normal under Windows 8 / 10, the issue here is that they do not resume and cannot be terminated.

Answer

The issue was the SN-DBS service. Stopping it killed all pending suspended processes.