Why is the menu bar showing the VPN "Disconnecting" animation forever?

You know how when you disconnect from a VPN, you get a little scrolling "Disconnecting..." notification in the upper right notification area?

Well, I'm getting that, but it never goes away. It's been "Disconnecting" now for 20 minutes. The VPN is not, actually, connected anymore, but the UI won't let me reconnect now.

The Network preferences panel shows the same problem:

The console shows that the disconnect did, actually, happen:

Somehow the only problem is that the UI is convinced that I'm still disconnecting, which makes it impossible to connect again.

Solution 1:

If you're using a PPTP VPN, try manually killing the "pppd" process.

sudo killall pppd

If that doesn't solve it, you may need to add a -9 to forcibly kill the process. You should try without first though.

sudo killall -9 pppd

Solution 2:

Try killall configd.

After this you may need to sudo killall SystemUIServer.

(thanks, Avner. I haven't verified this. Please upvote if it helps you).

Solution 3:

Try manually killing the "racoon" process, either through Activity Monitor or by running:

$ sudo killall racoon

Solution 4:

What is the status shown in the Network pane of System Preferences? You can connect and disconnect your VPN from there. Re-opening the connection from there my resolve the problem. You can also toggle the visibility of the VPN menu from that pane, and see if that helps.

Solution 5:

The SystemUIServer* process runs most of the stuff in the the menu bar. Kill it and it may solve your problem if it's just a UI glitch and not something deeper.

killall SystemUIServer

* /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemUIServer.app/Contents/MacOS/SystemUIServer