Dear Lord, How to stop the spinning rainbow?

Question

I ran a firefox web app that froze my machine, no prob, happens in Windows all the time. But that circle rainbow thing wouldn't go away. It even endured a reboot. Basically, I had to unplg the mac and start it in a different room for it to go away.
Are there any conrtol buttons to overrride this "feature?"

Answer 1

644/3090
Hi maximvs64,
Yes, there are such controls:
- The keyboard shortcut option-command-escape [⌥⌘⎋] will bring the Force Quit window. Choose the one frozen application and quit it from there.
- Open Activity Monitor (in the Utilities folder), then in the large processes window, highlight the problematic process and click the red "Quit Process".
- Last resort, if none of those work, use the power button: keep it depressed for a few seconds (as if you just hit it once, it's just a sleep command).
Your "Spinning Beach Ball Of Death" problem:
From your explanations, I'm not sure which process is stuck.
I thought it was your Firefox app (in this case, it's stuck for some reason, so just force-quit it as indicated above), but then you seem to be so stuck you cannot reach the "escape" commands (that would be a stuck finder): so try the power button.
When a process is frozen:
Usually the rest work well, it's not the whole system (that's the beauty of Mac OS X multi-tasking handling), so you just need to quit the one frozen process, without needing to restart.
When you see the "Spinning Beach Ball Of Death":
It is possible too, that no process is frozen, only some huge task is being run (sometimes due to a mistake, like for example the (long!) Finder process of duplicating 50000 photos, because you would have clicked the wrong line...).
Where does the problem come from:
Hover the mouse cursor over different open apps and the menubar: you'll find which works and which just gives the SBBOD.
Good luck!
Axl