Can’t cancel a Screen Sharing window. Skitch saves the day.

This morning I tried to connect from my MacBook to another Mac using OS X’s Screen Sharing application, and ended up staring at an unsuccessful connection window, that couldn’t be canceled. Skitch, the screenshot capture, annotation and upload tool, unexpectedly solved the problem.

As you can see, the “Cancel” button is grayed out, there are no window controls, and it’s evidently unassociated to any visible application. I tried quitting the Screen Sharing application, but to no avail. Basically, I was stuck — there was no way to get rid of this window.

Not wanting to interrupt my work, I just moved the window off to the corner of my screen, where it sat and spun. Later in the afternoon, I noticed the window sitting there, still spinning, and decided to tweet a Skitch of it, for the world to see and share in my frustration.

I fired up Skitch, targeted the zombie window and snapped. Skitch then came to the foreground, presented me with the image for annotation and upload, and I immediately had one of those “Ah, ha!” moments — the default title of the window was “NetAuthAgent”. See, Skitch, by default, uses the name of the window’s creating application to the name of new snaps.

Seeing that, I launched Activity Monitor, filtered on “NetAuthAgent”, and sure enough, there was the zombie process.

I clicked “Quit Process,” confirmed, and the zombie window disappeared. Neat. Thanks Skitch!

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