Force a misbehaving application to quit icon - freezes computer.

**a.v.l** · February 5th, 2012

In Ubuntu 11.10 - "Force a misbehaving application to quit" icon, freezes my computer and I'm unable to do anything else, other than to reboot the system. Is there a fix for this?

**Carborundum** · February 5th, 2012

I'm not familiar with that error, but IIRC that button invokes the xkill command. Do you observe the same behavior if you run xkill from a terminal?

**a.v.l** · February 5th, 2012

Originally Posted by Carborundum

I'm not familiar with that error, but IIRC that button invokes the xkill command. Do you observe the same behavior if you run xkill from a terminal?

Once I press the "force a misbehaving application to quit" icon the program opens and the mouse curser is replaced by a + symbol. from there the system freezes immediately and I'm unable to click on anything else. Can't use the keyboard either. The system locks up tight so I have to reboot to get things working again. This happens every time I use it. I'm afraid I'm unfamilier with xkill, how do I try this in the terminal?

**Carborundum** · February 5th, 2012

Open a terminal (ctrl+alt+t), write "xkill" (without the quotation marks) and press the Enter key.

**a.v.l** · February 5th, 2012

Originally Posted by Carborundum

Open a terminal (ctrl+alt+t), write "xkill" (without the quotation marks) and press the Enter key.

Thank you, that worked perfectly without freezing.

**oldspammer** · November 25th, 2012

Originally Posted by a.v.l

Once I press the "force a misbehaving application to quit" icon the program opens and the mouse curser is replaced by a + symbol. from there the system freezes immediately and I'm unable to click on anything else. Can't use the keyboard either. The system locks up tight so I have to reboot to get things working again. This happens every time I use it. I'm afraid I'm unfamilier with xkill, how do I try this in the terminal?

On Ubuntu 12.10 this happened to me too. I found that if I crtl-Alt-F1, login on that screen, then

Code:

cd ~/Desktop
ln -s /usr/bin/gnome-panel
sudo su -

I made a shell script as root: "killgnomepanel.sh"

Code:

#!/bin/bash

# killgnomepanel.sh

killall gnome-panel

Back in the command prompt:

Code:

chmod +x killgnomepanel.sh
./killgnomepanel.sh
exit

that it would result in the "killing" of "the kill program" that froze the x window screen session. I switch back to that screen via Alt-F7, then restart the gnome-panel by double clicking the link to it that I just created above on the desktop.

On another occasion I found that a terminate or kill of gnome-panel would not work if running as a regular user who supposedly owned the gnome-panel process, but instead, killing worked nicely as root, the super user.