[X4U] Tiger-unquittable/killable apps?

[Michael Elliott]

I don't remember running into this problem with previous OS upgrades,  
but now I get application lockups that I can't force-quit out of.

I will usually get the spinning-rainbow-beachball-of-death when  
passing the mouse cursor over a window associated with the app,  
whether it is DragThing, Finder, or (most commonly) iChatAV.  I  
attempt to quit the app, but the menubar is frozen. I then do a  
command-option-escape, which shows the applications to be "not  
responding." So I select them for force-quit.  They disappear from  
the Force Quit dialog...but not from the Dock.  If I close the Force  
Quit dialog and then reopen it, the apps are still there...not  
responding. I AM still able to launch new applications from the Dock,  
even if it is the Finder that is the app that is locked up.

I can go to Terminal and issue "kill" commands to the respective  
processes all I want to, but they processes do not quit.  Same with  
Activity Monitor.

I even tried simply quitting the Dock process to see if it was simply  
a matter of a UI error keeping me from re-launching the apps, but  
after re-launch of Dock, the apps are still there with their little  
triangles under them...

I've repaired permissions and when  problems persisted ran the newest  
version of AppleJack.  No help...and of course the problem only  
occurs randomly, and may go days between lockups.

I've had to hard-restart the machine more in 2 weeks than I ever did  
in the year before.

Anyone else running into this?

Michael