Is there a (more or less) easy way to force the process of a windows application to hang, and not respond? Or is this entirely dependent on the application/process in question?
Edit: What I wanted to try is this: The application in question has a web GUI, and several running processes in the background. There was a report that when one of these processes crashed, the web GUI stopped responding. I would like to try and reproduce that, but I realize it might not be that easy.
If you can get a handle to a thread in the application, you may be able to call SuspendThread() which will bring that thread to a screeching halt.
(Note that my answer assumes you want to make another application hang. There are a myriad of ways to make your own application hang, deliberately or not.)
In response to your edit, I recall that Process Explorer has the ability to manually suspend specific threads within a process. That would definitely be worth a try.
It depends on what you mean by "hang" and "not respond". Any GUI app that stops processing messages will become unresponsive as far as the user is concerned.
an easy way would be set the priority of application you want to hang to minimum and then run a loop infinitely in your application at low priority. this would starve the other application. not perfect but simple
If you could change code of that process so just insert for(;;); somewhere in it. If you could not change the code the easiest way to suspend process is using Process Explorer. Just right-click on wanted process and select Suspend in menu.