How to Kill an Application When Force Quit Doesn't Work
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Im trying to close uTorrent with the same method but it won't show up on "top" when it is clearly in dock and refuses me to log off my mac because it is "in use" when i can't even open the app myself anymore because of all the attempts to delete it.

did you solve this problem ? cause i have the same issue now and i dont know how to solve it :( i cant find utorrent on "top" !

I'm having the same exact problem now with iTunes its not showing up in top does anyone know what to do?????

Thanks for this but I am trying to close damn Carbonite and cannot force quit... cannot trashi it because it is running. After trying this it said "not permitted" Is there a way around that? I will go try the 9 part now.

Is there any reason to look up the PID yourself and use kill? Why not just use killall instead? For example, "killall Safari" will kill Safari. Also, I find that force quitting three times in a row seems to do something more than just force quitting once, and will get rid of just about any frozen app. If that doesn't work, a regular killall probably won't suffice either, so I have to resort to -9, as in "killall -9 Safari", which will kill it basically no matter what.

Thanks for killall Appname solution Loved that one. I had FreeMemory running, would not show up in Forcequit, wold not show up in top option or was unidentifiable by me. Hover cursor showed spinning wheel, app not in bottom bar and not shown in all windows. Killall app found and stopped the app - so once again thanks

Most of the kill stunts I've known about but one is really illusive: what happens when the window manager freezes. You can't get at a terminal and you can't get at the Force Quit menus or application. Once I hit the power-off button and it came up with the "are you sure" dialog, and that revived the window system to get on with, whew! But often I have to resort to the old "hold the power button for 5 seconds" solution. When I ran into that problem at Sun where I worked for years, you had a friend remote login to your system and kill the process from their system. But I see no work-any-time solution for the Mac, alas. Sigh!

kill has options. option -9 is force and sometimes necessary hence: kill -9 123456