Processes that won't die

[E Frank Ball]

Yesterday I had hung processes on two machines that refused to die.
Both are using RedHat 6.2.  Machine one had a couple of netscape
processes left after netscape died.  Restarting netscape resulted in
another hang and two more processes that wouldn't die.  The other was an
application we use at work.  machine two (output of 'ps -ef | grep rmb'):

yellowst  3556     1  2 Nov09 ?        01:07:24 rmb -title YELLOWSTONE_SYSTEM_CO
yellowst  3581  3556  0 Nov09 ?        00:00:01 [rmbkbdx <defunct>]
yellowst  3582  3556  0 Nov09 ?        00:00:00 [rmbhil <defunct>]
yellowst  3583  3556  0 Nov09 ?        00:00:00 [rmbtmr <defunct>]
yellowst  3741  3556  0 Nov09 ?        00:00:10 [rmb_pipe.3556 <defunct>]

The nescape processes looked similar.  The top level process had a PPID
of 1 (init), the child processes were zombies.  kill -9 by either the
process owner or root had no effect.  Both machines had to be rebooted.

There must be a better way.  Any advice?

Thanks,

-- 

   E Frank Ball                efball at efball.com
   work: (707) 794-4168        home: (707) 538-3693