Immediate system shutdown

I've been a longtime Windows user, but one of the things that has always frustrated me is the inability to stop processes that consume too much CPU. The standard CTRL-ALT-DEL key combination for accessing the security settings sometimes takes more than five minutes to respond if a CPU is overloaded properly. Esc likewise doesn't work. Does anyone know if there are any ways to configure a key combination to immediately drop all non-system processes. And yes, I am well aware of the system instability/data loss that this can cause. However, there are situations in which I have literally been forced to pull the plug on the power source in order to use the computer again from running perfectly valid and safe programs. As you can imagine, this is worse for data than dropping threads could ever be. Frankly, I'm getting tired of having to deal with the ineffective Task manager for killing processes. Thanks.

Although it costs $35 I've found that TaskInfo usually starts quickly whatever the circumstances and allows for processes to be terminated if they are causing problems. Provides plenty of information on processes and is quite customisable. There may be free solutions though so just a thought.

TaskInfo Home Page

Reset button??

Seriously, don't think there is a way, as logicearth states, if the CPU is really overloaded, anything you do will have to wait for a process to clear.

The thing is, I know that the CPU does still go through the context switcher and the rest of the OS interrupt stuff because the system does still respond within about 30 seconds. However, loading the security options screen and/or starting an instance of Task manager is the stuff that takes a long time. What I'd like is some way to get the system to drop everything once the system regains control. Obviously hardware interrupts would be rather difficult to implement