I'll second that request. A friend showed me how he was using AutoHotKey to automate things with Revit, but it was a bit of a convoluted process - and he had to account for Revit lags, because Revit doesn't register clicks very well while it's thinking.

It's a good little refinement. A number of the less intuitive users in my office immediately noticed and appreciated it. Now that I know about the spacebar shortcut, I'll definitely use that. I would have been missing out on the spacebar thing if not for your post though, so one step further would have been to put [space] in the tooltip for the "place" button.

I've been having this exact same problem for a while (with R2011 too). I still feel a little uncomfortable ending a process if I don't know much about it, but since it's a Windows process I will take my chances. Thanks!