[X4U] Tiger-unquittable/killable apps?

[Alex]

On May 14, 2005, at 08:45, Michael Elliott wrote:

> 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.

The spinning beachball does't deserve its lurid reputation. It's 
mereley an indicator which says, "This app takes longer than x seconds 
to finish whatever it's doing". Maybe it's crashed, or maybe just 
waiting for a network volume to mount, or any number of things, but the 
beachball doesn't point to anything specific.

> So I select them for force-quit.  They disappear from the Force Quit 
> dialog...but not from the Dock.

That's Apple's fault. It's an assumption that, once issued the kill 
signal, the process will be finished. Sometimes, of course, the 
assumption is wrong.

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

Depends on what spawned them. Sudo kill -9 is what I use, but that 
doesn't always work either, especially with zombies.

> I've repaired permissions

It's not a permissions problem, obviously, and it's not a Tiger problem 
per se. When it occurs, you should try to record what's going on, and 
who's the parent of the unkillable process. You definitely have a 
problem, but it's not clear to me what the problem is; I've found that 
this issue can be very difficult to trace.


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