What happens to running programs when you log off with them running in Windows 7?

Question

Is there a message / signal that gets sent to them signaling that the user will log off and thus they better run a hook that saves the files in memory to disk? Does all this get interrupted if you press force quit or force shutdown?

Answer 1

force shutdown and force quit simply kill the process same as through task manager. when you select log off and dont force anything then it does send a signal to the program to shutdown, for more info on the exact process follow this link

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa376876(v=vs.85).aspx

This is generally handled by the program to do a graceful program exit which involves saving the data, closing any processes and possibly several other things that the programmer decided to include in the program.