Subnormal operators, self-commutators, and pseudocontinuations

We study pure subnormal operators whose self-commutators have zero as an eigenvalue. We show that various questions in this are closely related to questions involving approximation by functions satisfying and to the study ofgeneralized quadrature domains.First some general results are given that apply to all subnormal operators within this class; then we consider characterizing the analytic Toeplitz operators, the Hardy operators and cyclic subnormal operators whose self-commutators have zero as an eigenvalue.