I’ve just recently (a few hours ago) run into applications not loading or quitting (even with Forced quits) on Mac OSX10.5 Leopard on a brand-new machine. Here’s the grueling story:

I tried to read a .doc and I declined to try Office 2004 for Mac. Nothing appears wrong at this point. I then tried to launch iTunes, it had the launched icon (blue circle) under it, leading me to believe it was running, but there was no window. I could not interact with iTunes at this point. I attempted repeatedly to launch iTunes to no avail. So, I did what any self-respecting GUI user did: Quit. After ignoring the problem report, I attempted the last straw, the Force Quit. After trying that several times, also to no avail, I turned to the Internet for help. Most forums suggested unplugging your iPod when this happens. I do not have an iPod attached to the computer. So I tried a little Unix magic. But “kill -9” from the command line was ineffective. Trevor suggested “killall Dock,” (the Dock is the application “Task Bar” for you Windows users) but that was also ineffective. iTunes appeared thusly in ps xau:

% ps xau | grep iTunes
6432   0.0  0.0        0      0   ??   E    6:45PM   0:00.00 (iTunes)

I’ve never seen an “E” state before, nor a process enclosed in parenthesis. According to the man pages for ps, the “E” means “the process is trying to exit.” The man pages, however, are silent as to what (PROCESS NAME) means.

Can’t Quit, Can’t Delete

Time Machine is running and was backing files up at that time to an external USB disk. It also refused to load or force quit (like iTunes) after stopping the back up. I could also not view the trash as it claimed that items were “being deleted.” The system was still responsive (I could browse the Internet to look for forums with this problem, but found nothing completely applicable). I attempted to restart: APPLE MENU > Restart. All windows quit, but the system would not complete the restart. After trying to restart AGAIN (the dock was still visible, so I opened up a Terminal and the menu reappeared), iTunes, System Preferences (Time Machine) and trash were still inaccessible. I then forced a restart by holding down the power button.

Office 2004 for Mac not the problem

Now, convinced Office was the problem, to avoid this problem again I attempted to deinstall the Office 2000 Test Drive application(s). That began to run, it claimed to have progressed 1/10th of the way through (as seen by the progress bar) at which point, the application was hung. Force quit was ineffective. I submitted a problem report about Remove Office crashing. But the application persists! Force quitting that does not shut it down either. Things are getting serious.

Time machine

Time Machine was not actively backing up at this time. I decided to unmount the back up drive “Time Machine Backups” (what Time Machine calls its backup drive). This did nothing as well. The drive refused to unmount, even though backups were stopped (this was done via System Preferences > Time Machine and then click the circled X near “Backing up” or “Next Backup”. Since that didn’t work, I decided to go for the gusto. I yanked the USB cable to the backup drive. This caused the trash to immediately empty. Remove Office quit. It appears that Time Machine is causing these hangs.

The External Drive

The external hard drive is a Smart Disk, 60GB FireLite XPress.

I then decided to check the disk. I launched the disk utility (Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility.app) and ran “Verify Disk”. It claims that the drive appears to be OK. I repaired it anyway and after a vigorous re-indexing (thank you Spotlight (AKA “mdworker” to ps)) the volume, again, appears to be OK. Things appear to be working again. I’ll try yanking the cable if it misbehaves again.

Problem

Applications not quitting, even after forced quit

Solution

Unplug external hard drives/iPods connected via USB.

Although it appears that Time Machine may be responsible, it may apply to all external USB hard drive devices.