Few days ago, I was having problem call the task manager out to terminate some running applications. However, you can still use the Terminal to carry the work by using this command.

ps aux

This command will display all the running processes. Below is a list to give you guys an idea how it will look like.

USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
nom 3026 0.0 0.3 2476 772 ? S 23:15 0:00 gnome-pty-helpe
root 3102 0.0 0.4 3712 1068 pts/1 Ss+ 23:23 0:00 /bin/su ko
nom 2321 0.2 3.2 14920 8364 ? Ss 23:44 0:01 mousepad


So you now can through the command to find which is the one causing problem. For my example, it is the gnome-pty-helpe that is giving me problem. So I just type in the command

kill 3026

Just in case the command cannot kill the nasty process, use this.

kill -9 3026