killing a gui mess

[bryan]

How do you remotely kill a frozen gui and cleanly get back to the login screen?

I'm running Jaguar Server 10.2.1 on an Xserve.

A few days ago, a rogue screensaver refused to go away and wouldn't show the password box. Typing in the password blindly didn't help either. I went to my PowerBook running Jaguar and ssh'd into the Xserve and started issuing the kill command to no avail. Killing the item "screensaver" didn't do anything. Neither did killing other processes like the loginwindow, WindowServer, or SystemUIServer. They just keep popping back with different pid's. After about an hour of trying different things, I gave up and issued 'shutdown -r now'.

Last night, I was running ATTO's horribly buggy config utility for the built-in Ultra 160 SCSI card. When I clicked on the Flash pane of the window, the Xserve pretty much stopped responding to keyboard and mouse input. I could move the mouse, but clicks weren't recognized and Cmd-Opt-Esc didn't do anything either. I went back to my PowerBook and checked 'top' and 'ps -aux' but found nothing that sounded like the ATTO config utility. I killed java, loginwindow, WindowServer, etc. to no avail. Again, I resorted to 'shutdown -r now'.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance,

Bryan