It’s the one tool in every Windows user’s utility belt that’s supposed to fix problems. When an app freezes, crashes, or starts hogging your PC’s resources, the go-to solution is always the same: hit Ctrl+Shift+Esc and let the Task Manager sort it out.

But what happens when the fixer becomes the problem?

That’s the bizarre, almost comical situation facing some Windows 11 users who installed Microsoft‘s latest optional update. A peculiar bug is causing the Task Manager to behave like a multiplying digital hydra: when you try to close it, it doesn’t actually shut down. Instead, it vanishes from view, leaving a “ghost” process running in the background.

Open it again, and you don’t get the old one back. You get a brand new, fresh instance, while the original ghost continues to haunt your system’s memory.

The Ghost in the Machine

The issue was first flagged by eagle-eyed users on Reddit, who are often the canaries in the digital coal mine for Windows updates. As detailed by user “BNSoul” and quickly amplified by tech site Windows Latest, the bug is tied to the optional preview update KB5067036.

Here’s how it works: a user, noticing a slowdown, opens Task Manager. After checking their processes, they do what they’ve done thousands of times: they click the “X” in the top-right corner to close the window. The window disappears as expected.

But in the background, the taskmgr.exe process never gets the memo. It just keeps on running, quietly polling your hardware.

If the user opens Task Manager again, a second taskmgr.exe process launches. Close that one with the “X,” and now you have two ghosts. Repeat this a dozen times throughout the day, and you can suddenly have a small army of zombie Task Managers, all dutifully monitoring your system and, in doing so, collectively eating up your CPU and RAM.

The performance hit is very real. Testers at Windows Latest confirmed the bug and, in one demonstration, opened and “closed” Task Manager 100 times. The result? Nearly 2GB of RAM was consumed by the phantom processes, each one taking up about 20-30MB. On a high-end gaming rig, this might go unnoticed for a while. On a laptop or a machine with less memory, this can quickly lead to system-wide stutters, instability, and a noticeable drain on battery life.

The ironic “fix”

The most frustrating part of this whole affair is the bitter irony. This bug wasn’t just a random error; it appears to be a direct result of Microsoft trying to improve the Task Manager.

According to the official changelog for the KB5067036 update, the patch includes a specific fix for an issue where “Task Manager might not correctly group apps with their processes.” It seems that in tweaking the app’s internal logic, the developers inadvertently broke its shutdown sequence. The “X” button now only tells the window to hide, not the underlying process to terminate.

As of this writing, Microsoft has not officially acknowledged the bug on its Windows Health Dashboard, despite the KB5067036 log’s claim that the company “is not currently aware of any issues with this update.“

How to fight back (while we wait for a patch)

Thankfully, the community hasn’t just identified the problem; they’ve also found a few solid workarounds.

If you’ve installed update KB5067036, you can check if you’re affected right now.

1. Open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc).
2. Click the “X” to close it.
3. Open Task Manager a second time.
4. In the “Processes” tab, look under “Background processes.” If you see more than one “Task Manager” listed, you have the bug.

If you’re affected, you have two main options:

1. The “Inception” Fix: To properly close Task Manager, you must use Task Manager… to end Task Manager. Instead of clicking the “X,” find the “Task Manager” process within its own list, right-click it, and select “End task.” This will fully terminate the program, ghost and all.
2. The “Clean Sweep” Fix: If you already have a horde of zombie instances running, this is the fastest solution.
   • Open the Start Menu and type “Command Prompt.”
   • Right-click it and select “Run as administrator.”
   • In the black window, type the following command and press Enter: taskkill /im taskmgr.exe /f
   This command forcibly ( /f ) terminates ( taskkill ) every ( /im ) instance of the program named taskmgr.exe.

For now, users are left with a choice: uninstall the optional update and wait for a proper patch, or live with the irony of having to babysit the one app that’s supposed to do the babysitting.