Following my problems with EyeTV refusing to quit, I’ve now discovered a similar problem with both CamTwist and Safari.

A few times, CamTwist (a freeware piece of software which manipulates live video from a connected camera, including the built-in iSight) has crashed, and then refused to quit.

Today, Safari quit while streaming video from the iSight into a Flash-based video encoder.

The link does appear to be either misbehaving hardware, or misbehaving software which is reliant on a piece of hardware.

EyeTV uses the USB interface for digital TV tuner stick. The other applications use the iSight, which is a USB device (albeit internal)

When each application crashes, I wonder if it doesn’t properly “give up” control of the relevant USB interface. It gets stuck in the endless “Process Ending” sequence, which can’t be killed by any method I know of.

What I’d love to be able to do is execute whatever kernel-level command is run whenever a user logs out, because then every application quits. It’s really annoying.

The call for ideas continues.

I really hope this issue is fixed in Leopard.