Why Does Force Quit Rarely Ever Work?

Question

I was a big fan Leopard. Before my upgrade to Snow Leopard, I had a very stable system that rarely had any problems. When I did have an issue, it was usually a problem with a Finder lockup up and my excitement about Snow Leopard was that the Finder was being re-written and would hopefully provide some additional stability. I have to say, I've been disappointed to see that isn't the case. I'm running 10.6.3 and am forced power off my machine several times a week because things lock up. That compares to maybe a couple times a year with Leopard.
I'm a long time Mac user and know the tricks to troubleshoot my system and have been slowly disabling things and not running certain software to try and pin down the cause. It looks like it's either Safari or iTunes but it's really difficult to tell for sure.
In any case, the reason for my post is my frustration with the Force Quit function that is rarely useful. When I get the the dreaded "spinning beach ball" the first thing I try to do is force quit the offending application. Right clicking on the icon in the dock usually freezes the dock. The Apple menu then won't pull down and if I'm able to use another utility I have in my menu bar to activate a Force Quit, it locks up after the menu drops down. This happens time and time again. My mouse moves and I can click on certain windows but am never able to regain control. Rarely (maybe 10% of the time) if something goes wrong and I get the "spinning beach ball," am I able to access the Force Quit function to kill the (application not responding). The rest of the time, I have no choice but to do a hard boot by powering off.
Why isn't Force Quit kind of like Activity Monitor but implemented as such a low level function that it can almost always be invoked (through a keyboard command or menu), even when the Finder has hung. It appears the problem is the Force Quit is tied to the Finder and when the Finder hangs because of another application (this also puzzles me) there is no was activate the Force Quit because until the offending application is killed, the Finder won't respond.
I'm sure over time, whatever is causing the freezes will be fixed and the stability of my system will return but Snow Leopard was supposed to be a more compact and finely tuned version of Leopard, re-written to support 64 bit and getting rid of most of the old Carbon system applications. The Finder was supposed to be a primary beneficiary of that effort and from my experience, it's less stable and provides no additional protection from locking when another application hangs.
As a Mac user, I don't expect to ever have to hard boot my machine to regain control. It risk corrupting my hard drive and the application flies that were left open. My Mac used to be a picture of stability but has gone done hill since moving to Snow Leopard. Kind of ironic given the pitch for Snow Leopard was decreased bloat and increased stability.

Answer 1

Overall, I'm sure the numbers are small but the point of these forums to is discuss real problems people are having.
I never denied that you're having problems, and tried to give you some suggestions and get more information to help you further. However, because I pointed out that your statements about being disappointed in SL are unfounded, you jump down my throat! Do you want to solve your problems or do you just want to whine about it?
Now...could something on my machine be corrupt?
Certainly.
Could one of my programs have a bug and be causing the issue?
Certainly.
Could be but generally when this has happened, only Apple software has been running
Are you certain? There are often little third-party background processes or kernel extensions that people forget about, since they don't show up on the Dock. This is one reason I've asked you about starting up in safe mode.
Somehow I fail to see how the OS is blameless. Because it should work but doesn't means something has gone wrong somewhere.
The OS cannot be blamed for bugs in third-party software or corruption from any number of possible causes, both of which are the most likely reasons for your problems. The bottom line is that there is no consistent pattern of issues with the current version of Snow Leopard that would indicate that bugs in the system are causing your problem. (Note that I'm not basing this solely on the behavior of my machine, but on the behavior of multiple machines that I have seen as well as reports on forums.)
I just wished Forced Quit was more reliable.
Force quit is reliable, unless you have a third-party app that is interfering with it at a very low level or a very serious problem. That's my third time saying that, and it's based on experience with probably more than 100 Macs in more than two decades, as a user, developer and system administrator.
Do you want to solve the problems that are behind your issues with force quit or not? You have not told us what you have tried. You have not responded to my questions about repairs to the hard drive, starting in safe mode or using another user account.