I never thought I'd have this problem. Mostly it's how to get mplayer to work. I use the non-gui mozilla version and usually it'll shut down when the page is closed but now I can't shut it off that way. There's no toolbar icon to click off, how'd you do it?? Thanks.

one way is to open a terminal and type killall mplayer

Thanks for the reply. I'll try that.

Hi rayser and detpenguin,
Just thought I would add for the sake of info for the record: my gui mplayer (recently installed) also would not shut down.
(Suse 9.1, kde session.)
Having a taskbar was no solution, it just would not close there either. In fact, after a time, there were TWO instances of mplayer. Logging off the session did not shut it down.
On logging out a dialogue box came up to say that mplayer had received a kill or term signal, but evidently that was not sufficient.
When I logged back in it (both instances) was/were still running -- and really busy too: thrashing the hard drive and everything else slowed down to a crawl. Even unhiding the taskbar became a slow job as if mplayer was using up all the system and ram and the taskbar had to be re-drawn from nothing.
On the other hand -- mplayer performs great so far for what I wanted it for: i.e. those pesky quicktime files. So far they look really good and sound good too.
I read that with all the mplayer codecs in place (and if xine knows where they are) xine would play quicktime .mov files. But now, since I installed mplayer, xine won't even attempt to open a mov. Pity, because although to mplayer gurus xine is a relatively basic and unintelligent piece of work, I have found that it also looks good and sounds good.
(Of course I myself might be a relatively basic and unintelligent piece of work.)

I've never had much luck with Xine. Gxine, for some reason, works better. I know that it just a front end for Xine but go figure. It works better than kaffeine for me too. There's only a couple of sites I go to where I need mplayer. The "killall mplayer" did the job for me.