<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8"> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/3.24.1.1"> </HEAD> <BODY> Lee, There might be a better solution than this, but if your XFCE session freezes, you should be able to press Ctrl-Alt-F1 which will give you a text screen where you can logon again.  You can then run 'ps -u username' to see what processes are running in your XFCE session, and use the 'kill' command (run 'man kill' for help on options) to kill offending processes.  When you are done, press Ctrl-Alt-F7 - this will return you to your XFCE session which hopefully might be responsive again. Regards, David On Fri, 2008-12-26 at 18:07 -0700, leegold wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE> <PRE> hi, I was downloading files w/Synaptic and possibly the server was congested - in any event the file would not download for synaptic to install. When this happened my keyboard freezed and my mouse/touchpad freezed. The only way out I could find was to press the start button on my laptop and reboot. This is disturbing. There should always be a way to kill it. But if my keyboard/mouse doesn't work how can I recover w/out a hard reboot? The little circle that turns when there's a download was there but didn't turn. After a few minutes I rebooted... </PRE> </BLOCKQUOTE> </BODY> </HTML>