[m021478]

Is there any way to go about dealing with an application that has frozen (or results in the spinning of the 'beachball of death')...and then to top things off, decides to prevent you from force-quitting it as well!! Not being able to force-quit a stuck App is a major problem, because it means that I can then not log-out, restart or shutdown my computer...inevitably, my only option is to hold down the power button on my machine to force-shutdown!

I've tried everything I can think of...

• I've force-quit by using Cmd+Opt+Esc;
• I've tried force-quitting by Opt+Right-Clicking and choosing Force-Quit from the contextual menu;
• I've tried quitting and force-quitting from the activity monitor;
• I've tried force-quitting the Finder (even though it's not the Finder that has locked up
• I've tried using the terminal to run "killall Dock" (I know this is a stretch, but it's gotten me out of sticky situations in the past...)
• I've even tried using the 'Force-Restart' script that's included in the 'extra scripts' plugin for QuickSilver

As I originally said, when this happens to me, it usually results in my having to force-shutdown my computer, which is definitely something I would rather avoid completely for the sake of my internal/external HD's, and the data on them...

Any suggestions as far as alternative steps I might want to consider trying before using the last resort of holding down the frickin' power button would be greatly appreciated...

Thanks!

[Simon]

Just kill the process.

Use top or ps -aux to find the PID of the process and then do a
kill -9 PID

Of course if his happens repeatedly it would be better to find out what the underlying cause is and to try and fix it.

[jmiddel]

Well, when this happens to me, I cannot even get to Terminal because the cursor, while moving, does not do anything. Can't do the Option key force quit by clicking on the item in the dock, no opening of anything, including said Terminal. Like the OP, I have to effect a hard restart. This happens in Safari, Word, AudioHijack, SuperDuper InDesign and more. What I don't understand is why this happens regularly in a Unix based system, which should not allow any single program to take down the whole system.

Simon, I would dearly like to find the underlying cause of this strange behavior, so far I have rebuild the directories with DiskWarrior, ran fsck, ran TechTool on the filesystem, rebooted in Safe mode, and have encountered a bunch of problems, from overlapping files to an inability of fsck to correct whatever problems it found. It is not a failing HD, this happens when booted from any of my three attached drives. It has been occurring more in the last couple of months than ever before, I rarely had to reboot. Gahhh!

[m021478]

Originally Posted by Simon 

Just kill the process.

Use top or ps -aux to find the PID of the process and then do a
kill -9 PID

Of course if his happens repeatedly it would be better to find out what the underlying cause is and to try and fix it.

Thanks so much for the tip...I'll give it a shot the next time this happens to me...

Originally Posted by jmiddel 

Well, when this happens to me, I cannot even get to Terminal because the cursor, while moving, does not do anything. Can't do the Option key force quit by clicking on the item in the dock, no opening of anything, including said Terminal. Like the OP, I have to effect a hard restart. This happens in Safari, Word, AudioHijack, SuperDuper InDesign and more. What I don't understand is why this happens regularly in a Unix based system, which should not allow any single program to take down the whole system.

Simon, I would dearly like to find the underlying cause of this strange behavior, so far I have rebuild the directories with DiskWarrior, ran fsck, ran TechTool on the filesystem, rebooted in Safe mode, and have encountered a bunch of problems, from overlapping files to an inability of fsck to correct whatever problems it found. It is not a failing HD, this happens when booted from any of my three attached drives. It has been occurring more in the last couple of months than ever before, I rarely had to reboot. Gahhh!

I would suggest reviewing your start-up items...actually, the best way to go about it (without creating a new account and subsequently transferring over all of your files) would be to remove basically everything from your current account's log-in items, and then slowly (very slowly) one by one add each one back, and see if you can't figure out which one is causing your problems...

It's also worth having a look at which background processes/daemons you have running constantly (which wouldn't show up in the log-in items...

Also worth considering removing any extras from your contextual menu items folders, as I've had problems in the past with buggy cm plug-ins...

other than that, you might want to consider getting PC because they are more user friendly and they never get viruses...

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Simon 

Just kill the process.

Use top or ps -aux to find the PID of the process and then do a
kill -9 PID

Of course if his happens repeatedly it would be better to find out what the underlying cause is and to try and fix it.

I've had this happen on my MBP plenty of times, and when it happens no amount of kill -9 is able to make the damn thing die. Even sudo shutdown -h now just ends up hanging at the spinning wait indicator, and it never completely quits. What's more, I don't think it's something I can fix, as I suspect the root cause may have something to do with the NVidia 8600M, as it often tends to happen immediately after the GPU has twigged out. However, it also sometimes happens when I try to connect to a Bluetooth cell phone, so maybe not. Either way, I've had the logic board replaced, and I've reformatted and reinstalled twice, and it's never fixed the problem. Given that I never had these sorts of problems on my old G5, my conclusion is that the early 2008 MBP (the one being praised as the "best laptop ever" in another thread) is simply a piece of junk and that I should have waited for the late 2008 model instead of blowing 2 grand on a laptop that can't work as well as a $400 Dell running Ubuntu.