The Handle VIew

The Handle View

The Handle Context Menu

Two items appear under the Handle menu or when you right-click to show the Handle context menu:

Close Handle: choose this item to force closed a handle. Use this at your own risk: because the process that owns the handle is not aware that its handle has been closed, using this feature can lead to a crash of the application or data corruption; closing a handle in the System process can lead to a system crash.

Properties: when you select this item Process Explorer opens a handle properties dialog that shows you the total number of handles open to the object, as well as kernel references to the object. It also shows information specific to the type of object you are viewing. For example, when you view the properties of a mutant object Process Explorer reports whether or not the mutant is held, and if so, by which thread.

The Security tab on the handle properties dialog shows the security that's applied to the object the handle references.

Show Unnamed Handles

By default, Process Explorer shows only handles to object that have names. Select the Show Unnamed Handles item under the View menu to have Process Explorer list all the handles opened by a selected process, even those to objects that are nameless. Note that Process Explorer consumes significantly more CPU resource when this option is selected.