Vista Ultimate does not kill a process

I'm using Vista Business in my Fujitsu laptop, I ran DBxpress to recover

my old outlook express mailboxes. For some problem, the application

stopped responding for a long time, and I decided to terminate the

process. I can't seem to use "end process" and "end task" to kill the

non-responding application, while in XP, I can kill them easily.

I pressed the power button to shut it down and hope it can kill the

process, then computer then stays on the "shutting down" screen with the

rotating donut, now it's almost 45 minutes since then and the donut is

still rotating but nothing seems done. I'm going to manually power it

down and hope nothing was lost.

Is there a way to properly terminate a process/application? Seems we

need a patch for this issue.