| I had the same problem
I just had the same problem - disk access on my firewire drive failed (the drive is new and seems to work fine), and time machine hung, along with the system prefs and the finder. Neither sys prefs nor finder would respond to a force quit (exact symptoms as above: sys prefs showed up in the list of applications to force quit, died & tried (but failed) to send an error report, and then persisted in the dock and would not respond to subsequent force quit requests). Finder relaunch also failed - finder showed up after re-launch as running in the force quit list, but in fact the finder was not running. I pulled out the firewire cable for my external drive, and the zombie system prefs disappeared and the finder started responding immediately.
Thanks for describing the problem. I hope apple ships a fix.
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