Killing a Crashing App

Coming from the Windoze world, the solution to killing a crashing app (if it hasn't already hosed the operating system itself) is to reboot the machine. In the Linux world, it is not so. But - if rebooting is not necessary, what is the trick??

My SuperKaramba app crashed yesterday, causing an ugly blank square on my desktop where my Liquid Weather theme had been sitting. I wanted to kill the crashing SuperKaramba and restart it.

First, I ran the command:
ps ax

to view the currently running processes on my system. Then, I scrolled through the list to find SuperKaramba and made a note of its process ID (pid).

Then, I killed it with:
kill -9 pid

like,
kill -9 1234

Bye bye SuperKaramba! I restarted it and all is well.