[Solved] After Force Quit in OS 10.4.11 OOo 2.3 won't open

[caj]

I just downloaded OpenOffice 2.3 on my 1.25 GHz PowerPC G4 Mac Mini with 512 MB RAM and 23 Gigs storage running OS 10.4.11.

I had just finished giving OpenOffice its first real workout -- making documents in the Writer and feeling very pleased -- when one of the documents I had created wouldn't close. At the same time, OpenOffice wouldn't quit, so I ended up Force Quitting OOo. Now when I try to launch it, X11 opens a terminal window and the OOo menu will appear but the program itself won't launch. Neither, again, will it Quit from the menu, causing me to have to Force Quit it.

Has anyone run across this problem? (And if I have to uninstall the program -- excuse the stupid question -- how would I do that?)

[wurzel]

Has anyone run across this problem? (And if I have to uninstall the program -- excuse the stupid question -- how would I do that?)

Try opening a Terminal from the Utilities folder (in the Applications folder) and typing :

killall -9 soffice.bin

and then try restarting OpenOffice.org normally.

Alternatively, look for hung or zombie processes from the same terminal by typing :

ps -aux

In the list that is displayed, you might see one or two entries with the text 'soffice' in them. Check out each corresponding entry and at the beginning of each you will find a PID. This is the process ID. You can stop this process by then typing :

kill xxxx
where xxxx is the PID mentioned above.

Do this for each and every instance of the soffice process that shows up in the list.

You can then try and start OpenOffice.org again normally.

Alex

[caj]

Excellent. That did the trick.

I used your second option and saw many instances of soffice processes, but after I killed the first one, I kept getting the message that the other processes didn't exist. So I tried launching OOo again, and this time it launched, only stopping to give me a window saying that either my personal permissions were locked or another version of OOo was already open and that I should close it out of risk of creating inconsistencies in permissions. It gave me the option to continue or exit. I exited to look for open versions.

I couldn't find another version of OOo open, so I launched and continued. OOo fired up. I was able to see my files. I was then able to close OOo, and when I opened it a second time, there was no warning message.

Let's hope that's one problem settled.

Thanks a bunch.

[cvburns]

I too had a similar situation with my Mac (X OS Tiger) when I tried to open a document. I could neither quit nor force quit, nor even turn my mac off. I followed the second step and after kill XXXX'ing the 11th one, the screen closed, as well as OO. (**important note: when choosing what to kill, no entries indicated they were "soffice"; I merely based what I kill xxxx'd on date and time, and what had a 4 digit PID - seems only OO had four). I then reopened OO - which went smoothly - and it began document retrieval (which I canceled). Thanks for the advice, worked like a charm.

caitlin