Existing firefox process preventing firefox opening

[smolloy]

Firefox crashed, so I had to kill it, and now I can't get it restarted. It complains that

Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.

The usual methods

pkill firefox

or

ps aux | grep firefox
kill <PID>

just don't work. Even giving kill the "-9" switch, and executing it with sudo won't kill it!

I also tried removing the lock file from .mozilla/firefox, but this didn't help.

The output of "ps aux | grep firefox" is,

smolloy 12385  0.2  3.9 230412 81948 ?  D  19:04  0:04 /usr/lib/firefox-3.0/firefox

Can anyone give me a better way to fix this crash rather than restarting my computer?

[smolloy]

I forgot to add that this problem is with firefox 3 on Ubuntu Hardy.

Anyone any ideas?

[geniuz]

Firefox and Firefox3 are 2 different programs...

Have you tried:

killall firefox3

[smolloy]

I think I've found the problem. Ubuntu 8.04 comes with pulseaudio installed, and this is screwing things up (for me and *many* others). It tends to lock the system when you play audio, since it only allows one program to access the sound card at a time.

Usefully, it locks up the system until you (hard) reboot. Sometimes it very kindly doesn't lock the system up, but won't let you play any more audio until you reboot -- and you have to reboot hard, since alsa is also locked up.

The Pulseaudio maintainers (the helpful people that they are) insist that this is the expected behaviour of their code, and not a bug. Which makes me wonder how to uninstall their piece-of-**** code so that I can actually listen to my mp3's without hard rebooting my machine.

*fume*