It seems that service control (SC) is a command-line equivalent
(perhaps a slight superset) to what the Service GUI provides...
unfortunately no command for "reset what you think you know about this
service". Turns out though it was right. Unbeknownst to me, that
there was some sort of zombie child process associated with the killed
process that was what the Service control manager was waiting for. In
the end, a utility called "procexp.exe" was able to help associate
service names with executable file paths and process ids to kill
associated processes that the default taskmanager couldn't help with...