[X-Unix] Hung-up Finder can't be killed

[Jerry Krinock]

I have an Applescript which is cron'ed to run every day and copy files to my
flash-disk MP3 player which has a Windows FAT file system.  Sometimes, this
flash disk gets corrupted, and when it does, the Finder hangs while copying
files.  I see a dialog which says, for example:

Copying 139 items to "Today's Files"
Item: "23.AG.05.MP3"
Copied: 28.6 MB of 112.3 MB
Time remaining: About 4 minutes

The progress bar in this window is stopped, and it will stay that way
forever.  To try and keep this topic narrow, I'd like to ignore that larger
issue for now and ask if anyone can help me with this:

This dialog has a "Stop" button on it.  When I click it, it flashes but
nothing happens.  The close box is grayed out.  Force-quit/relaunch does not
work.  If I to Terminal and "ps -alx | grep Finder", I see that the (Finder)
has status E, which means "The process is trying to exit".  But it will not
go away even if I try to help it with "kill -6", or "kill -9".

Other applications can be launched and generallly work OK.  But, of course,
with this process running, I cannot log out either, so the only way to get
my Finder back is to force restart.

I plan to report this bug to Apple, but since that is a rather involved
process, can anyone here give me a quick hint?