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.
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.
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?