how to really kill a process?

[mte]

hi,
sometimes (mostly after wake from standby) some applications freeze in a way that I can't "force quit" them. When I do "ps -ax" I get "E" as state ("trying to exit" says in man page) and the name of the app is in parentheses.
If I then try to "kill -9 <pid>" it still doesn't quit.
Any idea how to get rid of the frozen app instead of rebooting?
thanks,
matej

 

[72930]

Open activity monitor, select it and 'Force Quit'

 

[mte]

thanks. I will try it when this happens next time but if cmd+option+esc -> force quit doesn't work and right click on dock -> force quit neither, I'm a bit sceptical why doing the same thing just from another application would work better than all that I've tried...
matej

 

[yellow]

If "kill -9" doesn't kill it, then there's nothing you can do but 1) wait for the process to die, or 2) reboot. Possibly a logout might encourage it's end.

 

[Kelmon]

Ah, thanks for the post on the subject as I've had this issue twice now and I was hoping not to have to reboot. Presently iTunes has gone this way - it's a strange issue. The iTunes application appears in the Dock but Activity Monitor can't see it. Force Quitting the application from the Dock does nothing and even using the "sudo kill -9" does nothing from the Terminal. For anyone interested the following is how the application appears in the Terminal when executing the command "ps -ax | grep iTunes":

797 ??         0:00.00 (iTunes)

Time for a reboot then...

 

[Kelmon]

OK, this is getting annoying. After VMWare Fusion had a visitation from the ****up Fairy (it completely locked up when attempting to access the Mac filesystem and proceeded to consume all system resources) I tried to reboot my MacBook Pro and both the Finder and Coda have gone into this unkillable limbo state.

I may well try reinstalling Leopard again this weekend since at this moment it's really annoying me. Surely it can't be this bad, can it?