Apps not shutting down

I'm having trouble with apps shutting down fully in 9.2 Pro. One is the KNode newsreader. I constantly have to ps -ef | grep and kill -9 to make sure all copies have released before relaunching. This goes for Real Player as well -- there seem to be one copy in memory for each time I've loaded a streaming radio station. Then there's bzflag. If I press quit it just sits there...I have to Ctrl-Alt-F1 to launch a new terminal and kill -9 it. And, last but not least, the whole GUI won't shut down about 1 out of 3 times when I log off -- I have to do it at least 2 or 3 times before it actually ends the session or restarts.