Thanks to all for the help with win32eventreactor and spawnprocess. I came across a great windows package called wmi (for microsoft's Windows Managment Interface). It gives you very low level access to your windows system. It uses win32. Here is the URL: http://tgolden.sc.sabren.com/python/wmi.html Here is some sample code to run Thanks for the help on this, I will post my final code for the compute node class ---------------------------------------------------------- import wmi c = wmi.WMI () diskList = [x for x in c.Win32_LogicalDisk (DriveType=3) ] procList = [proc for proc in c.Win32_Process () ] for x in range(10): for disk in diskList: print disk for process in procList: print process ---------------------------------------------------------- Note: to kill a job, you can call terminate on a process object result = process.Terminate () ------------------------------------------ disk output: instance of Win32_LogicalDisk { Caption = "G:"; Compressed = FALSE; CreationClassName = "Win32_LogicalDisk"; Description = "Local Fixed Disk"; DeviceID = "G:"; DriveType = 3; FileSystem = "FAT32"; FreeSpace = "9506979840"; MaximumComponentLength = 255; MediaType = 12; Name = "G:"; Size = "12572344320"; SupportsDiskQuotas = FALSE; SupportsFileBasedCompression = FALSE; SystemCreationClassName = "Win32_ComputerSystem"; SystemName = "BDSWXP1"; VolumeDirty = FALSE; VolumeName = "LOCAL DISK"; VolumeSerialNumber = "ED293D74"; }; ------------------------------------------------- process output instance of Win32_Process { Caption = "System Idle Process"; CreationClassName = "Win32_Process"; CSCreationClassName = "Win32_ComputerSystem"; CSName = "BDSWXP1"; Description = "System Idle Process"; Handle = "0"; HandleCount = 0; KernelModeTime = "7163013906250"; Name = "System Idle Process"; OSCreationClassName = "Win32_OperatingSystem"; OSName = "Microsoft Windows XP Professional|C:\\WINDOWS|\\Device\\Harddi sk0\\Partition1"; OtherOperationCount = "0"; OtherTransferCount = "0"; PageFaults = 1; PageFileUsage = 0; ParentProcessId = 0; PeakPageFileUsage = 0; PeakVirtualSize = "0"; PeakWorkingSetSize = 20480; Priority = 0; PrivatePageCount = "0"; ProcessId = 0; QuotaNonPagedPoolUsage = 0; QuotaPagedPoolUsage = 0; QuotaPeakNonPagedPoolUsage = 0; QuotaPeakPagedPoolUsage = 0; ReadOperationCount = "0"; ReadTransferCount = "0"; SessionId = 0; ThreadCount = 1; UserModeTime = "0"; VirtualSize = "0"; WindowsVersion = "5.1.2600"; WorkingSetSize = "20480"; WriteOperationCount = "0"; WriteTransferCount = "0"; };