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 > ~/Desktop/tracevlc.txt 2>&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.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=
my previous response follows:
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=
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
Yes. I have a mid 2015 MBP which I have upgraded to Sierra from Mavericks and before that all the way back to Lion.
I find that Cmd-Tab frequently (more often than not) fails to tab to the correct window, stopping 'one short' which suggests that the list of icons displayed when Cmd Tabbing is different from the internal list of programs that it cycles through for some reason.
I also recently had a problem (for the first time) where Terminal windows failed to show in the task switcher at all until I restarted the OS.
Best Answer