Processes that won't die

[Devin Carraway]

A process that won't die under a sigkill is either blocked in some protracted
and unlikely fashion or you're looking at a kernel bug.  Unless you had I/O
issues just then, I suggest investigating the latter possiblity.

I'm inferring that it was blocked -- 'ps ef' under GNU ps will show you a
process forest with environment variables.  cat /proc/<pid>/status for more
useful detail if you can recreate the problem (also Alt-SysRq-T if you have
sysrq support available).

-- 
Devin  \ aqua(at)devin.com, 1024D/E9ABFCD2;  http://www.devin.com
Carraway \ IRC: Requiem  GCS/CC/L s-:--- !a !tv C++++$ ULB+++$ O+@ P L+++