Prevent C# app from process kill

I'm willing shut the app down when they try but need to do some things first.

Having necessary steps at program shutdown leads to fragile programs that break easily. Even if you could prevent someone from killing your program via the task manager, you cannot stop them from turning off the computer, or even pulling the cable out of the wall. Whatever task that was so vitally important to complete will be lost. And what if there is a power cut? Again your task won't complete and your vital clean up code will not be run.

Instead you should make your program robust to failures at any point. Use transactions, and always save state to files atomically - make sure that you always have at least one valid copy of your data. Don't overwrite important files in a way that they become temporarily invalid.

Finally, you can add a dialog box to your program that when they try to close it, warns them that the program needs to shut down properly. If you make your shutdown fast users won't want to kill it and will let it terminate properly. If your shutdown takes ages then people will try to kill it. If you are nice to your users, they will be nice to you too.

If shutting down fast means that the user will lose some unfinished work then warn them about this and give them the opportunity to wait for the task to finish, but if they really want to quit your program then let them quit.

You really, really, really don't want to do this. It makes users very angry!! However, if it is supposed to be a service, run it as a service account and don't give admin rights to users.

You can't - as long as the user has the right to call TerminateProcess on your program, you can't prevent End Process from killing you immediately in task manager. Raymond Chen posted on this some time ago: The arms race between programs and users