Leopard rant - hard shutdowns all the time

Although I'm used to many quirks, I am really annoyed by the number of 
times I have to hard power-off machines running Leopard.

My own laptop with the 3G connection, I normally have to hard power off 
several times a day - five or six isn't an exaggeration. It happens 
when the phone loses connection to the net somehow, and Leopard simply 
can't cope with it. You ask it to disconnect - it just stays there 
saying "Disconnecting" forever - never will and so you can never get a 
connection back again. Select restart - no, just shuts all the desktop 
etc. down and then hangs with a spinning wait symbol. What it's waiting 
for is for the Disconnecting process to die, but we've just established 
it won't. Even Terminal is no help with kill -9 - pppd process goes 
zombie and won't go away.

Now I've just had to hard power-off a laptop because, once again, its 
connection to a network resource went away. In the case it was an 
AirDisk (yes, this is related to my Time Machine thread below). First 
problem I've had with Airdisk since upgrading to the latest firmware, 
and I don't think it's a co-incidence two machines were trying to use 
it. Once again, Leopard simply couldn't recognise something had gone 
away and Time Machine refused to cancel. Couldn't restart either - same 
thing, hanging Leopard when trying to shut down and just showing a 
spinning wait symbol.

It's so frustrating - Leopard just seems utterly rubbish at coping with 
unresponsive networks and/or unresponsive processes. Never had this 
hassle with Tiger - could always kill stuff, could always restart. 
Leopard though...pah.


Cheers,
Ian