I have a Windows Server 2003(Enterprise, SP2). My understanding was that any process created by a user will be terminated when the user loggs off the account. But its not happening. I login via Administrator account. Start a simple java process and logoff. But the process is not killed. Is there any configuration for this or something? I am mostly a software programmer and not much in to servers and so I am stuck. I found out that while logging off, 1) Win32 is supposed to send a CTRL_LOGOFF_EVENT to all processes started by that user. 2) JVM is supposed to handle this event and terminate the VM. But I can't understand why my java process is not killed when i logoff. Any idea!!!