Stray Zombie Help Please

Stray I'm having the same problem, but no answer yet. How about you?

Have you rebooted? That should clear it up.

It sounds like the MindVision ViseX installer has failed on you and/or you have a partial installation. Look in /Library/LaunchAgents and /Library/LaunchDaemons for any Xerox-related files. If you find any, move them somewhere else, restart, and reinstall. If you don't find any... Well, let's just hope you find some. Otherwise, you'll have to do some serious digging.

They are not files you can delete. They are processes. There is a formal definition. They are child processes whose parents have forgotten about them. The only way to get rid of them is for the parent to process them correctly or for the parent to die. The problem lies entirely inside the installer. Something in the logic is broken.

Since you referenced that launchd message, I thought that there might be something that is partially installed and is having some problem that the installer didn't anticipate and is causing the failure. If you want, you could list the entire contents of your /Library/LaunchAgents and /Library/LaunchDaemons folders. The offending file may not be recognizable as belonging to the Xerox installer. We would be able to recognize it, however, as being a non-Apple file.

Ah, zombies... Alas, here's what a zombie is...

The computer has the notion of a "process". This can be an actual application, a service, whatever -- it's a program that's running. The process can, among other things, start other processes (e.g., a program can launch another program). When this occurs the initial process is called the "parent" process, and the newly started ones are the "children".

If a child process goes away (it finishes, is killed, whatever), the system tries to make sure that the parent gets notified that the child's gone, and under what circumstances it went away (namely, the system tries to tell the parent if there were errors, the process was killed by the user, or if everything went without a hitch). It does this by sending the parent a signal that something happened to one of the children. The parent is then responsible for checking in to receive the information about the child.

A "zombie" refers to a situation where the parent process never acknowledges the death of the child process. The table that lists all of the processes that are running on your computer keeps the child listed, along with information about the circumstances under which it departed, but the child is now long gone. The "zombie" will remain until the parent retrieves the information about the child, or the parent dies. The zombie is not an actual process, just a note about one now dead, but it persists as an entry in the table of processes.