2025 Solution to fix installer stuck on "Attempting to kill Discord #399
Description
I noticed in the other thread regarding this bug that some people still didn't get their issue solved, some people were providing solutions, but nobody provided the actual solution that was for my case so I just wanted to provide it here.
The installer would state that it's attempting to kill discord:
But would after state that although it couldn't kill the process, it installed successfully, only for you to open discord and find that there is no better-discord section in your settings.
For people who are already experienced with using computers or are more knowledgeable than the average person, all of you have to do is go to your %appdata% then go back one directory to Local, find the Discord folder, delete any older versions of discord, if it doesn't let you then download process explorer and use the find tab at the top to find any processes that reference "discord", if there is a discord.exe open, then force close the process and it's process tree, then once its closed go back, delete the older versions of discord(it should let you since the process is closed) and retry the installer.
For non "tech savvy" people, or people who just want to follow steps:
The solution I found was to delete versions of discord that weren't needed --> use process-explorer to find and kill discord -->retry installation.
To find and delete unnecessary discord versions:
go to %appdata% and go back one directory to the Local folder, or simply go to C:\Users[youruser]\AppData\Local.
Example path if your Windows user is named "Phil", go to: C:\Users\Phil\AppData\Local
You then want to go into the Discord folder and delete any folder that isn't the latest version.
If you dont have any older versions, go ahead to the process explorer step.
For this example I will keep all other files in this folder, but delete the app-1.0.810blahblah folder as the latest version is app-1.0.9207.
If it doesn't let you delete the folder and states that the folder is open or some file within that folder is currently in use, then we need to forcibly close this with Process-Explorer as even if there is no discord.exe open in your taskmanager, something is still open.
Download process explorer here.
And click "Download Process Explorer":
Go to where the file is downloaded, and either use 7-zip to extract or use extract all, where you'll then get the unzipped folder ProcessExplorer:
Inside that folder run one of these or assuming you're on a 64bit windows system run procexp64.exe:
Which it should then open and look like this:
At the top of process explorer click the find tab, and click Find handle or Dll:
Then type in discord and click search. And within those results should be at least one row that has the process name as discord.exe. You can then click the row that says discord.exe, and it should locate it for you in the explorer:
Where you can then right click it and click kill process tree.
.
Once that is done, either retry the BetterDiscord Installer and attempt to install or repair if you're repairing, OR go back and delete the older discord folder that it didn't let you delete before, then open the BetterDiscord installer and retry installation again.
These steps were meant to be extremely easy to follow, but if you still can't install it, refer to the older thread here, and try any solutions that were provided in the comments, if those didn't work, comment here and either I or some random guy will help you.