[X-Unix] How to REALLY kill Finder.

[Stroller]

Hi there,

I posted this question to http://discussions.apple.com before  
realising that you guys will probably have some better answers. So  
please excuse me in the (unlikely) event you read this twice.

Last night I was converting a bunch of video files in Quicktime and  
copying them to a samba server on the LAN (so I could play them on my  
Linux-based media machine) when the Finder stopped responding and I  
got the spinning beachball of death.

The beachball appeared when I clicked on one of the files in Finder  
and it tried to generate a preview in column-view. The media files  
were fairly big ones (1 gig) and .mkv format (which seem particularly  
processor-intensive to decode) and I'm pretty sure the file in  
question was on the Samba server.

So all in all everything seemed to be against the Finder creating  
this preview and I figured it was going to take a long time to do so,  
so I'd just force-relaunch the Finder and go back and open the folder  
in a different view in order to copy it wherever it needed to be.

After doing so, though, Finder fails to restart - I've got no icons  
on my desktop and I can't navigate to a folder of files to click on  
the one I want to view.

Often in the past when I've experienced this, typing `open /path/to/ 
folder` in terminal has had the effect of forcing Finder to restart,  
however on this occasion I get this error message:
"2008-05-23 18:11:07.383 open7567 LSOpenFromURLSpec() returned -600  
for application (null) urls file://localhost/Applications/."

If I look for the process using `ps` I see the process name in brackets:
   $ ps -wwwwwx | grep Finder
   5958 ?? E 0:00.00 (Finder)
   $
I presume the brackets indicate that Finder is behaving badly, but  
`man ps` doesn't seem to explain exactly what they mean. Apparently  
the "E" in the above line indicates that the process is trying to exit.

Anyway, I can't get any further using `kill -9 5958` or anything else  
I've tried so far.

The Finder icon is still showing in the Dock and if I right-click on  
it I see "Application not responding" (greyed out), "Hide" and  
"Relaunch". Choosing "Relaunch" has no effect. Finder does not seem  
to appear in Activity Monitor (showing "All Processes") . If I open  
the "Force Quit Applications" dialogue again the Finder is still  
shown and highlighting it changes the button from "Force Quit" to  
"Relaunch", but clicking that has no effect (except that Finder  
disappears from the lit of programs; it reappears if I close the  
"Force Quit" window and reopen it from the Apple menu).

Obviously I could sort this by rebooting my computer, but I really  
don't want to do that right now. Can anyone suggest a way of properly  
killing this process so that Finder can restart? (a way that doesn't  
kill off all my active windows, that is!)

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions,

Stroller.