Leopard unable to force quit application

[Charlie12345]

No luck with activity monitor.

It appears to be an issue with programs freezing that are in the middle of an "open" dialogue while there is a frozen disk mounted. e.g. a cd that will not eject.

So my real issue is that my dvd-rom will most often lock up after trying to eject a disc. I can interact with the disc fine, but the moment I try and eject it my system goes haywire.

If you were to manually eject the drive with a paperclip into the "emergency eject hole", you'll get the black screen of death.

[umiwangu]

I'm having the exact same problem, almost to the detail like Charlie12345. It's happened three times today, once with a CD that wouldn't mount (or eject) and then with flash drives, both with Parallels.

Seth

[Charlie12345]

umiwangu -- since removing Parallels I have not had this issue. It's been a major problem resolved

Apparently Parallels has an issue with grabbing priority (or something in that spectrum) of disks; when finder has an "open" window up somewhere (which I believe typically scans the table of contents or mounted disks) and Parallels is using something, finder locks up certain portions of the system until it can continue. Force quitting Parallels may not even resolve this, as there are certain background tasks that do not allow termination, or at least instantly restart upon termination. These are causing the issue (in my opinion, from the current info I have).

[umiwangu]

Oh boy. Was this Parallels 3 or 4?

[Charlie12345]

Parallels v 3.0

So you really need win apps running, huh? Thankfully, I installed Win XP via boot camp on my macbook, and have that sitting next to my mac on my desk - it can run any windows apps I need to and shares files back and forth.

[umiwangu]

It's actually not mine, but a friend's. A very computer illiterate person who was tired of their pc crashing. So having to do boot camp would be too complicated.

Yeah, I have boot camp on mine, actually use the Windows side a lot more than the PC side.

Watch out for compatibility back and forth... I'm assuming you know this, but in case not, Mac OS X can only read NTFS (recommended file system for 2000/XP/Vista). But you can download MacFuse (Google Code or some other site). You can also get HFS Explorer for accessing the Mac partition. Doesn't work like Explorer or Finder, but at least you can access stuff without rebooting.