Kill Current Program

I'm looking for a way to kill a fullscreen app that has frozen in Windows XP. sometimes ALT+f4 will do it, but usually, not the case. It's that syndrome where shit's running just fine the background (music is still playing, etc), but the screen is locked, and I can't get to the task manager (often I can get the alt+tab menu to pop up but beyond that, nothing will come up 'in front' of the offending program). When I can get to the task manager, if I just kill the process of the fucked program, all is well. the problem is not being able to get to the task manager because of the frozen program (games mostly) blocking everything else out

I don't suppose there's a hotkey that will actually kill the -process- of the current program (like ALT+f4 except... effective?)

failing that, is there some kind of .bat file or similar I could make to achieve the same end?

I tried something I found elsewhere which sometimes works, a shortcut (attached to a hotkey on my keyboard) with the target "%windir%\system32\taskkill.exe /f /fi “status eq not responding”", but this isn't very reliable (I'm guessing because even though the screen is locked the program(s) may not actually be recognized as 'not responding'. is there a variant of this that would simple kill the 'foremost' task, regardless of whether windows believes it's responding?

If u have a g15 / 19 / whatever keyboard where u can program macros - just make a bat file with this (sans quotes)

"taskkill /f /im whatever.exe /t"

taskkill - herp, kills task
/f - forces the task to stop
/im - image name
whatever.exe - the executable that locks up
/t terminates any child processes that the task is running.

And that's it.