Security vendor NoVirusThanks has released Process Lister, a sort-of task manager which displays running processes, their key data, and provides various ways to manipulate them.

The program opens with a familiar list of processes and their details: PID, name, session, command line, 32/ 64-bit, parent PID/ process/ command line, description, company, signer, user/ domain and more.

There’s plenty of detail here, but there are so many issues that we began to lose count. The process name is displayed as a full path, which means you often can’t see the executable name; you can’t click a column header to sort, you can’t hide or reorder columns; you can’t display processes as a tree.

Right-clicking a process displays multiple options. Some are familiar – Properties, Open Containing Folder, Terminate – but there’s more. You’re able to suspend and resume a process, terminate and delete it on reboot, view a file hash, dump process memory, inject a module, or view associated windows, handles or modules.

A rubbish Task Manager with some useful bonus tools

These functions are more interesting, but we still noticed problems. Choosing the “List Object Handles” option displayed absolutely nothing for every process we tried.

Process Lister also includes a Tools menu with a host of bonus extras.

• “Search Handle” and “Search DLL” should allow you to locate open objects or loaded files
• File Hasher calculates various hashes for the files you specify
• Dos Device Inspector displays Dos Device names and their path (\Device\Video1)
• Driver Loader and Unloader allows manually loading or unloading kernel drivers
• Raw File Copy copies a file without going through the Windows API, which means it works even if the file is locked or you don’t have the security rights to access it
• IPv4 blocker enables blocking specific IP addresses
• System Restore Point creates a restore point
• There are simple displays of page files, loaded kernel modules, running services and basic system information.

Some of these tools have value. Raw Copy in particular is useful, and not often found elsewhere. But most of the modules are basic, poorly implemented, and don’t work together in any coherent way.

Overall, Process Lister is a terrible task manager, but at least it’s portable, convenient to use, and there are so many individual functions that you might find one or two which justify the download. Take a look if you enjoy exploring low-level geekiness, but don’t expect too much.

Process Lister is a free appliication for Windows XP and later.