X-CTU is a ROACH MOTEL!!!!

it hangs so hard that N-O-T-H-I-N-G will terminate it - not even a reboot (it holds on so hard that reboot even hangs).

The only way to stop it is hold the power button on your computer until it does a force-shutdown. When you do this you risk disk-corruption.

Why does Digi not make X-CTU respond to task-manager kill-process?

This is a terrible piece of software. I recommend you get the (excellent) embedded-software people who write the XBee and other embedded systems to help out a bit with this thing.

Guys! It’s near unusable! 7 crashes today alone

I think it’s caused by the port driver your computer has. It belongs to OS so when it hangs, OS stops.

primeg, you may want to try Moltosenso’s Network Manager, it does almost the same work than X-CTU and maybe with this you can check wether the port driver is the problem.

http://www.moltosenso.com/client/fe/browser.php?pc=/client/fe/download.php

Interesting, but I’ve never had trouble killing XCTU running under Win7-32, Win7-64 or XP-32-bit.

I agree with you that it is not an ideal program and often unpredictable, giving you various ‘not possible’ answers, which a simple retry proves is possible! I frequently exit and restart it when it seems to be extra ornery.

But I also agree with Andy - the only thing which can lock up a PC so that shutdown fails is a hardware-level driver. XCTU has none of those & just uses stock FTDI drivers. You didn’t say if you were using USB or serial (or even Linux).

Sounds like you have a bad driver in there - perhaps a customized FTDI driver from another company which is misbehaving when pointed at the FDTI chips in other hardware?