Kill All Non Essential Processes?

I made an application that helps facilitate malware removal by running a bunch of different CLI scanners at once; among other things.

The app was made to run in normal and safe mode. The problem, is that since it has been made to run in normal mode, it essentially becomes useless if the malware has installed a rootkit that kills executables as they open or if they've messed with the exe file association in the registry.

So, to get my app to run, I thought to do 2 things.

First, change the file association of my app to either .com, scr, or .pif so that it can still launch but won't be affected by messed up reg keys or identified by the rootkit.

But, I still need to worry about that rootkit for the other apps.

So I thought to just kill all non essential processes.

What would be the best way to accomplish this?

I thought of two different ways:

I could either have a pre-compiled list of system processes that need to stay running or when looping through the processes, I can identify each by a specific property, like company name or something else.