At some point I noticed that my Task Manager’s processes list becomes empty. This usually happens after a long(er) uptime (in the order of weeks/over one month).
Digging around the internet for similar issues revealed nothing useful until I’ve hit this hidden gem of a thread which instantly clicked as I was oddly experiencing the issue on only two of my computers – incidentally the only ones running a similar authentication/token software.
In my case the culprit is the Thales/SafeNet authentication client that I need to use for my digital signature token and which is normally always running in the tray.
I noticed that simply closing the client resolves the issue, so I wrote myself a small batch file to kill it and then restart the problematic process:
@echo off taskkill /f /im SACMonitor.exe echo Restarting process... start "C:\Program Files\SafeNet\Authentication\SAC\x64" SACMonitor.exe echo Done.
Now whenever I discover that my Task Manager is blank, I run the batch file and all is instantly well again.
