How do you tell the program to shut down gracefully? If it's a GUI program, posting the proper message to the main window, or perhaps broadcasting it to be save, is my first step.

The problem is that I don't know anything about the process to be killed. In theory, it could be anything. In practice, it is very often a (non-GUI) C++ application, which has run on a CASSERT, which in turn pops up a message box, and the process waits forever that some kind soul would click the message box away. But this is only the "typical" scenario, not the only one. The reason is that I don't write the applications which run into those processes, so I can't know in advance what they are going to do....