As long as we’re taking about OS X, I have a fix for when you try to screen share another computer on your network and the dialog box hangs… Really, this is super-annoying. You can get rid of it by rebooting, but I hate rebooting. You can’t easily hide it because it floats above other windows, and you can’t force quit it. Well, not easily…
In your favorite terminal program (I personally like iTerm but Terminal.app will do) type the following:
ps aux | grep NetAuthAgent
And you should see something like this:
pete 38146 0.4 0.2 2823072 13644 ?? S 8:28AM 0:43.59 /System/Library/CoreServices/NetAuthAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/NetAuthAgent pete 40131 0.0 0.0 2425700 264 s001 R+ 10:26AM 0:00.00 grep NetAuthAgent
That first line, with the /System/Library/CoreServices/NetAuthAgent.app bit is the one you want. See the first set of numbers in that line? That’s the process id (or PID.) Once you know the PID, you can do the following:
kill 38146
Typing the kill command followed by the process id should get rid of the dialog box.
Alternately, you can type:
killall NetAuthAgent
killall is a little more risky, as it kills processes based on name, not the PID, so if you have multiple process with the same name, it will kill them all. Hose things up enough and you’ll need to reboot, which is what we wanted to avoid doing in the first place.
Aren’t bugs fun?