Stubborn Processes

[markw at mohawksoft.com]

>> My question is how can it be that root cannot kill a process?  

If root can not kill a process, that means the process is in a condition in
which it can not be killed. (Nice reasoning huh?)

Actually, the only time I have seen this is when a process is hung in a
device driver. (not to be confused with something like ODBC which runs in
application space.)  The driver is waiting for an event which will never come.

run dmesg and see if there are any hardware errors. This could be because
the hard disk is failing and causing operations to hang.