Leopard unable to force quit application

J

jeno

Registered
I am running 10.5.2. and just recently the systems acting weird.

I have some software such as mail, text edit running and suddenly it stop responding. The mouse cursor keep on spinning for a long time. What you normally do is hit Option + Command + Esc to force quit the software. After i've done so. The software crashed and ask you to send in the crashed report and everything else is very normal. But the software dint actually quite. i can still see a small indication (at the dock) below the icon that the software still running and when i hit Option + Command + Esc again. I still can see the software in the force quite dialog, it doesn't report it as stop responding. When i check the Activity Monitor, there is nothing there. Everything else works fine except the crashed software cannot quit and i can't relaunch it.

Anyone experience this?
 
I had the same problem. Tried various repair utilities and repaired permissions etc. Nothing worked so I did a clean install and the problem hasn't come back.

I am sure others can suggest a simpler way of getting around the problem though.
 
In Terminal,

top

should show all running processes. There are two options: either the application is running and we can kill it with

kill pid

where pid is the number for the process, e.g. kill 928 for killing a process that shows that PID. The second option is that the process is a zombie, and it can't be killed, and the RAM wasted by it will be released only at reboot.

Top should also list how many processes are running, and if there are any zombies.
 
I had a problem with Logmein, because it would restart any of its processes I tried to force-quit. Finally, I found the installer and nuked the whole thing.

Doug
 
I've had this problem and I think it is related to Time Machine. When the problem occurs programs lock-up, can't be killed so that they can be relaunched (process running in the Dock but not in Activity Monitor) but I've found that when this happens Time Machine is preparing a backup to the attached FireWire disk. Telling Time Machine to cancel the backup doesn't do anything (gridlock condition, perhaps?) but unplugging the disk causes all "orphaned" processes/applications to quit properly. Needless to say, OS X complains that I unplugged the disk without unmounting it properly but it does appear to resolve the issue.

I am not certain if this is the same situation that you are seeing but if you are using Time Machine then I think that's your problem.
 
Its not only Time Machine. Looks like Mac OS / Mac computer has some trouble with external storage devices. Mac OS will "freeze" if it fail to read the disk even though the disk is fully functional. Sometime it see the disk but did not recognize the content inside it. It is ok to leave it plug into you Mac and it will show up at your deskstop like it always does without accessing it. But when you try to access it, it will spin and spin and "freeze" everything. It even happen to thumb drive too.
 
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.
 
We have just started experiencing the same thing on the Mac my secretary uses. Thanks for pointing out that Time Machine may be the culprit. We'll try deactivating it and see if things clear up.
 
I had the same problem as well since I switched to Leopard. I am not using TimeMachine. At work I am in a quite Linux oriented environment. I had to do quite a lot of things directly on a server. I used sshfs, expanDrive and MacFuse/MacFusion. Until today it looked as if the problem was related to being connected to the server. Right now I am experiencing the problem without being connected nowhere (except to the internet). The application does neither react to any of the standard Force Quit methods nor to kill via terminal.
 
Turning TimeMachine off isn't enough. I've had several apps one after another refusing to quit and not showing up in Terminal (running 10.5.4). I've had to force restart my MacPro 2 or 3 times a day for weeks, just like the good old times before Os X. My solution was to UMNOUNT the firewire HD where TimeMachine is backing up (not physically, but in the finder), then all the "zombie" apps will forcequit and can be immediately relaunched.
 
Same problem here too. An application starts to freeze with a spinning ball and then refuses to quit with "force quit." When I force a reboot in single user mode and run fsck I always get an "Invalid file and folder count" when fsck checks the volume information. The problem is fixed but recurs within an hour or two.

I have run Leopard Cache Cleaner and TechTool pro but with no result.
 
I see it's been about a month and a half for you all since this thread's been hit.

I'm experiencing the same problem.

This is definitely not Time Machine, not DivX, etc etc etc. This is a more general issue, which I believe is associated with disk mounting and unmounting. OSX is especially picky about mounting and un-mounting filesystems. If you are experiencing "error -600" when trying to launch apps or are losing the ability to Force Quit, I think that these things are directly related to Finder's inability to perform some basic library functions because it is suspended some sort of activity until it can finish a disk action. It seems unable to finish this disk action for some unknown reason. We can hope this is a simple bug in leopard and will be fixed with an update. I am on the most recent version as of this writing, so I'm not sure what to do from here.

EDIT: When I say "unable to force quit", I mean that your application may "go away" but it's definitely not "quit" in the usual sense; it remains on the dock with a blue light underneath it and is visible when using CMD-Tab and in the force quit menu, however the application does not respond and is NOT visible in Top (via Terminal).
 
Actually I hadn't thought to try that. I guess I was assuming any kind of command through the GUI was really throwing a unix command, like 'kill', at the app. I will try Activity Monitor next time this comes up and post my findings...

Thanks for the idea ;)
 
You are welcome!

Sometimes my Bittorrent will not fully quit--for my t3h aw3som3 and legal Genesis live torrents. Normally, clicking on "Force Quit" thought Finder will do the trick, but I did try it through Activity Monitor once, and it worked nicely.

--J. "666 is No Longer Alone!" D.
 
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.
 
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
 
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).
 
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