Ugh, this is something that friends of mine have to deal with. Thankfully my current employer sent me a new MBP with nothing on it but the core OS. It does annoy me they didn't get the 32GB version, like it was ~$400 to bump that up but no. I've easily spent more than $400 worth of time watching a beachball spin while I find what is eating all my memory.

> suffered an unfortunate accident

scheduled or unscheduled?

I actually had a loop in background that would kill -9 various services every few seconds until I finally got them all uninstalled.

If you can kill -9 it sounds like it could have been uninstalled?

You need to kill -9 the denial-of-service-causing services so you can actually interact with the system in order to delete them. (I used to have to do this with organizational Windows machines before I realized I could boot off a livecd and either rm -rf them, or just install a real operating system; I assume OSX/MBP is similar.)

If I select "unscheduled" will I have to fill a survey before I can reboot the machine?