hi petri,
process of john was left in a curious limbo state. Did you update your system while in simgle user mode, didn't you. Well doing security while online with multiple users online is not good practise.
marc's secchk scripts are started automatically daily, weekly and monthly. they are not supposed to change any vital settings, but only to check for and report potential problems.
It seems the files have been tampered with. This might also result from an unclean shutdown leaving some or all filesystems mounted read/write while rebooting.
Have you considered this behavior being created by some part of filesystem activity. It might well happen if you tried to kill some 'child' which was for example doing write operations to unreachable filesystem part ( which by the way turned unwriteable by the security scripts for example ). The parent might just had being 'retrying' for the critical write operation.
how would this explain that everything's running fine when logged in as root? regards, michael balzer -- b&b computersysteme * kämperheide 10 * 58285 gevelsberg * germany fon +49 2333 913924 * fax +49 2333 913925 * http://www.bbcomp.de