For a forced kill, either of those methods should be fine. This is obviously in the situation where the normal shutdown isn't responding. You should be keeping an eye on the error logs for the "Notice: nsmain: AOLserver/4.5.1 stopping" message. Sometimes it can just take a long time to stop.
There was a lengthy discussion recently on the AOLserver mailing list about these occasional problems with Windows versions of AOLserver shutting down. I'm not sure what the final resolution was. You can see some of the threads here. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.aolserver/16523
Brian
