I'm adding content as i find information that's been useful to me, so keep an eye on the site as I add more info.
the first piece of useful information is a powershell and cmd combination. I have a SQL server that has been a little awkward lately, and even after i've made all of the usual changes, it refuses to play nice and one of the processes goes crazy from time to time rendering the server useless. As I dont want to restart the server and its unresponsive, I found that I could use a powershell command to find out which proess was causing the issue. Once I did this, if i stopped the process everything went back to normal and the server was useable again. The easiest way i could find to do this was to use taskkill (which I use through Powershell, even though its a command line command)

list the processes running on a remote server

get-process -computername "servername"

stop a process running on a remote server by process ID

taskkill /s "servername" /u "username" /p "password" /pid "process ID from previous command"