zombie process

A zombie process in Windows is a terminated process that still has an entry in the process table because its exit status has not been read by its parent process. On Windows, these can appear in tools like RamMap as orphaned PIDs that are not visible in Task Manager. Users have reported seeing many zombie processes after extended system uptime, raising questions about memory management and driver behavior. While typically harmless, an accumulation may indicate a software issue or a bug in the operating system's process handling. Troubleshooting involves checking for unresponsive parent processes or using tools like Process Explorer to identify the source.