In this paper we employ the Rosenbrock system matrix pencil for the computation of output-nulling subspaces of linear time-invariant systems which appear in the solution of a large number of control and estimation problems. We also consider the problem of finding friends of these output-nulling subspaces, i.e., the feedback matrices that render such subspaces invariant with respect to the closed-loop map and output-nulling with respect to the output map, and which at the same time deliver a robust closed-loop eigenstructure. We show that the methods presented in this paper offer considerably more robust eigenstructure assignment than the other commonly used methods and algorithms.