[X Newbies] "The application ShutDown canceled logout"

[Michael Winter]

On Saturday, December 14, 2002, at 01:00  PM, David B. Holton wrote:

> I'm quite sure it has to do with Classic, since I don't seem to get the
> message if Classic isn't running. But that's rare, since I have it set 
> to
> start at login.
>
> AND, sometimes I actually have to go in and manually stop Classic 
> before I
> can shut down at all.
>
> Any ideas what might be the actual cause? And fix? While not 
> debilitating,
> this is rather annoying.

I"ll start by saying one of the first things the OS has to do when you 
tell it to shut down is quit all open applications. If, for some 
reason, it can't quit one of them because that application has frozen 
or has an open file with unsaved changes, or has something else going 
on that requires user feedback, the shut down process will time out. 
The same thing can happen if some application simply takes too long to 
quit.

Now, IIRC, when you tell OS X to shut down, it gives the "quit" message 
to Classic, which first has to quit all the applications it has 
running, before it can quit itself. Sometimes this process simply takes 
too long (depending on the Classic applications you have running) and 
you get a shut down error. When you tell OS X to shut down again, 
Classic has been working on quitting its applications since the first 
command, so its less likely to run out of time the second time through. 
If Classic is freezing/crashing anywhere in the process, then you may 
need to manually Force-quit it before shutting down.

The bottom line is there may not be a fix. I'd pay attention to what 
applications are running in Classic before shutting down to see if 
there's one that's causing the trouble. The other thing to do is to 
quit most/all of your Classic applications before shutting down to see 
if that fixes the problem (if not it's probably something in Classic 
itself).

-Mike