I read an item in your column a few months ago about closing processes running in the Task Manager under my user name (which is HP_administrator). However, when I go to close some of the processes a message appears saying “Terminating the process can cause undesired results”. Can I safely close these processes?

If the processes are running under your user name then they should be relatively safe to close, as the message which appears is simply warning you that because you are terminating the process in a rather harsh and brute-force manner you are not giving the process a chance to save any data or safely close the accessing of any data, and this could result in data loss or data corruption. That said, if the process does not have a front-end (i.e. a graphical user interface application) which can be used to close the process then you have few other methods to close the process. Since most of the processes which run in the background are loaded on Windows startup, if you find closing the process does result in system instability then you can (in theory) simply restart the computer which will automatically start all the processes again. To conclude, before proceeding you should think carefully about whether you actually do need to close processes using the Task Manager. However, if you do need to close a process, and there is no other way to safely close the process, then you don’t really have any other options than to use the Task Manager to end the process.