Earlier this week, news emerged about a bizarre Task Manager bug where an attempt to close it results in the exact opposite. Even though the Task Manager window disappears, its process keeps running, and every subsequent try to open Task Manager creates an extra copy, leading to a pile-up of duplicated processes eating up your RAM and CPU. The most ironic part is that all of this happens in production, not some super-early preview build.
To all of this, Microsoft now has an answer: Yep, Task Manager is screwed.
The company acknowledged the bug by posting a message on the official Windows Health Dashboard website. There, the company explained that the bug happens on client Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2 with the latest non-security update (the one that introduced the redesigned Start menu and new battery indicators).
The bug is not a big deal if you regularly restart your system (say, start a PC in the morning and turn it off by the evening). System shutdown or restart clears it of all Task Manager duplicates, but if your computer runs nonstop, the issue may turn seriously ugly and result in massive resource drain. To those who do not restart or shut down their PCs, Microsoft has a few workarounds. First, you can close Task Manager by clicking "End task" instead of the X button. Also, you can run Command Prompt as Administrator and execute taskkill.exe /im taskmgr.exe /f to end all Task Manager instances.
Microsoft says it is working on fixing this problem, and it will share more details once they are available. Microsoft has a bunch of ways to fix bugs like this. It could be the Known Issue Rollback mechanism, an out-of-band update, or something else. Whatever Microsoft picks, you"d better watch out for those Task Manager processes to make sure you are not wasting all of your RAM on them.