Hello, Last night I finally had to push the on/off switch to get out of Linux :( I had been running xawtv (tv viewer) which had an option to write and view avi files of what is broadcast. Somehow in using this program I started several (maybe 7) xanim jobs which were all zombie. There were also other processes which were zombies, all told about 35. I got out of KDE and logout of VC1 and found it would not regenerate the login prompt. Logged in as root to VC2 and check ps aux. Tried killing the zombies (fruitless to kill something dead). Logged out VC2 and found it did not regenerate the login. Logged into VC3 and tried "init 1", "teleinit 1" both had no effect in getting into single user mode. Did "shutdown -r now" and "shutdown -h now" both of which did not work. Did "sync" and hit the off switch. Question: What would a non-newbie (I've used Linux for about 2 years) do to recover without having to reboot. I had over 20 days uptime. System: Running Kernel 2.2.3 along with required rpm updates on a RedHat 5.2 system. PS I know this is not a SuSE question but I'm hoping there is someone knowledgeable that can help. Regards, Terry Eck eck@raytheon.com -- To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e Check out the SuSE-FAQ at <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/"><A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/</A">http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/</A</A>> and the archive at <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html"><A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html</A">http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html</A</A>>