osx 10.2.4 force quit less effective

[evildan]

Has anyone else seen a decrease in the effectiveness of "force quit"?

Since I installed it on both my laptops and a G4 of mine, all of the machines require two attempts before an unresponsive application is quit.

iTunes sometimes requires three attempts.

After the application won't quit on it's own, I attempt a force quit on the application, it disappears from the list, as usual, but it doesn't actually force quit the application. The process is still running, the only thing that has changed is that it's now off the GUI list of running applications.

After attempting another force quit, iTunes will appear back on the list (this time in Red). Sometimes iTunes will quit at this point, but most often I have to attempt one more time before iTunes actually stops.

I've also noticed this with other applications (Entourage, PhotoShop, etc), so this leads me to believe that it's an OS problem.

 

[CEMatt]

I've had similar problems...I've tried to 'force quit' applications when they wouldn't launch(spinning gear) and wind up having to do a hard restart..I've also noticed 'force quit' doesn't work as smoothly as on earlier OSX versions. I agree it's probably an OSX problem.

Matt

 

[MrNivit1]

I tend to notice this as well... Especially if I am playing songs off of my iPod with iTunes in the background and I am doing a lot of other things. iTunes stops playing and won't respond to button calls. I force quit it, it disappears, but the triangle is still under the icon in the dock. I force quit again and it dissapears. Relaunching iTunes will get my machine stuck and I have to hard restart. If I don't try to re-launch iTunes and just go on using my iPod (as my portable storage device), it will eventually freeze up the Finder like iTunes froze up. This forces another hard restart. It's becomming a real pain...

 

[dixonbm]

I'm having this problem with a list of applications.

Everything from itunes, system preferences, Chimera. They all hang and I have to force quit them.

Have you all noticed your apps hanging alot getting a beach ball more often than before. It seems I only get about 24 hours of up time till I get the beach balls.

What's going on here?

Any ideas? Anyone else experiencing the beach balls more often than they should?

 

[Racer D]

Originally posted by CEMatt
I've had similar problems...I've tried to 'force quit' applications when they wouldn't launch(spinning gear) and wind up having to do a hard restart..

no need to restart the machine, just type "top" in terminal, find the application, check it's process ID, and type "sudo kill ID" in another terminal window. this will kill the application on unix level and it's sure to work

 

[Lazzo]

It might not be 10.2.4. I've updated the regular Apple apps but stayed on 10.2.3 and this started happening to me a fortnight ago. Of course, it could be that those apps don't like 10.2.3 a lot. But, force quit doesn't work for me like it did prior to Mac OS X Update Combined 10.2.3, QuickTime 6.0.2, iTunes 3.0.1.

I guess the terminal command is okay (not a command-line man), but difficult when frozen solid.

 

[evildan]

Originally posted by Racer D
no need to restart the machine, just type "top" in terminal, find the application, check it's process ID, and type "sudo kill ID" in another terminal window. this will kill the application on unix level and it's sure to work

Or you can open the terminal and type "ps aux" which will give you a list of currenlty running processes at the moment the command was executed. Then type the above command (sudo kill XXXX) where "XXXX" would be the process id number listed.

This -- of course -- really doesn't solve the problem of the GUI not working AND the issue that was originally raised... the force quit has become less effective. It used to work for me 100% of the time. I could count on it working. Since 10.2.4 it's only worked about 1/3 of the time for me. We're back to the the OS9 equivalent of force quit. I rarely used it because it very often didn't work.

I would hate to have to tell the people in my department, open up the terminal.

I am currently solving this problem remotely by ssh'ing into their machines and killing the process remotely. I'm very happy to have the ability to even do this, but it would be nice if they could do it themselves through the GUI... that's what it's for right?