Why is the menu bar showing the VPN "Disconnecting" animation  forever? You know how when you disconnect from a VPN, you get a little scrolling "Disconnecting..." notification in the upper right notification area?



Well, I'm getting that, but it never goes away. It's been "Disconnecting" now for 20 minutes. The VPN is not, actually, connected anymore, but the UI won't let me reconnect now.

The Network preferences panel shows the same problem:



The console shows that the disconnect did, actually, happen:



Somehow the only problem is that the UI is convinced that I'm still disconnecting, which makes it impossible to connect again.
If you're using a PPTP VPN, try manually killing the "pppd" process.

sudo killall pppd


If that doesn't solve it, you may need to add a -9 to forcibly kill the process. You should try without first though.

sudo killall -9 pppd