How to restart or shutdown a Mac when it says app running but cannot force quit the app? I have a Macbook Air running Yosemite 10.10.4, and I am trying to either to restart or shutdown this Mac.  

But it will say the app VLC Player is running, but if I right click the VLC icon at the dock and choose Force Quit, nothing happens. (the neon light under the icon is not lighted up by the way, so doesn't look like the app is running).

If I press Command Option ESC, and choose Force Quit for VLC, nothing happens, and restarting the Macbook still says I need to Force Quit the app VLC.

In Activity Monitor I don't see a VLC app running either.

If I open up the Terminal app and use ps aux | grep -i vlc then nothing show up except for this grep command line.

So how do I restart or shutdown this Macbook when I need to Force Quit an app but Force Quit doesn't work?  I don't want to do those extreme things such as pressing the power button for 5 seconds or Command CTRL SHIFT PowerButton (or something like that) which is like to yank the power cord if it is a desktop.
Good to hear that the shutdown worked.  Remember to precede it immediately with a 'sync', executed as the root user or via the sudo analogue, to flush the hard drive caches to disk from volatile memory.  

If you desire to investigate deeper, in hopes of learning what is going on ( I hope you seek more info... ), then please do the following:

 1.  Open Terminal, and then open two, distinct windows.  


 2.  In one window only, type:  

     sudo dtruss -afloe -n VLC &gt; ~/Desktop/tracevlc.txt 2&gt;&amp;1

 3.  In the other window, type:

     open /Applications/VLC.app

 4.  Attempt to reproduce the original problem.  If you need to shutdown, do so.  

 5.  When the machine reboots, read the tracevlc.txt on your Desktop -- it might well provide a clearer understanding of what is happening...  


Hope that this helps!  Let me know if you find anything of interest...

F.

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my previous response follows:
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Do you get anything from executing as your login-user (non-root) the following in a Terminal:

launchctl list | grep -i vlc


or

sudo pgrep -f -l -i vlc


Try this:


obtain a root shell via:

sudo -s

Sync drive buffers to hardware:

sync

Attempt to terminate vlc by various means:

pkill -KILL -f -i -l vlc

killall -9 -z vlc 

killall -9 -z VLC.app

Attempt to tear down user-space, terminate all userspace apps, shutdown system services, and reboot.  If you are running a recent version of OS X, then this works best:

launchctl reboot system



Otherwise, do this:

    shutdown -r now