Alrighty, I've been end-tasking now for a bit. But I believe IT has caused a new problem for me. It's borked my task manager, to be exact. You know all the extra stuff for the task manager like performance, network... well they gone. All I'm left with is the process window. Literally. If it wasn't for the icon that appears down in the system tray, I wouldn't be able close THAT window. I know damn well that the quit routine has caused it one way or another because I first noticed it during one of these escapades out of the game. At first thought it was just a coincidence, but I now see it's borked even if I don't run steam or nothing.

If ANYONE can help me fix this, it would be greatly appreciated!

This is win XP pro btw.

If you can't picture what's happened, go into your task manager, and to the process window (the one that shows active programs, not every mundane thread.)
That's ALL I have. No X in the corner, no other tabs, nothing!

1) Don't killthings form the taskmanger regularly, its just bad.

2) If you are doing this b/c of the Steam problems atm, I seem to remember that stopsound fixes the problem (type stopsound, then exit/quit)

3) reboot and pray.

Thanks for the response, but that wasn't what I was looking for.

I guess I need to clarify myself.

I can live having to reboot, or end task or whatever to quit NS. (I have my own fix for that.)

It's the fact that my task manager is permanently messed up because of the few times I had to "end task" my way out. (See attached screenshot) Click on your task manager.

I cannot always close it either. A system tray icon (down by the clock) will appear when it first pops up but disapears (permanently, again) when the window loses focus.

As a side note, the stopsound thing doesn't work. Not for me anyway. My trick now is to simply disconnect from a server before the server changes the map, then reconnect when it changes. As long as I don't go through a server initiated map change, I can exit or change servers perfectly fine.

This is how my task manager is messed up permanently like. If someone could enlighten how to fix the stupid thing. (I REALLY like being able to use it properly to monitor my memory and network usage.) I guess I'm hoping someone who's had this happen could help.

Ahh cripes. Good ol google. Here I figured steam had done something evil to my registry or something of that sort. Here is the fix as found in some tech forum: