Jerry Feldman wrote : | If you have a small test program that exhibits this problem, could you | send it to me. When things should work, but do not, there is generally | something else involved. Well, that's part of the problem, i can't get this faulty situation to occur on my own machine, i can only get it to appear on a slower (300 Mhz) PC. I think the problem has got something to do with task-swaps and timing since on the slower PC it happens regularly but not 100% of the time. Since the PC is slower it spends more time in the kill-waitpid sequence (these commands are right behind one another in my source), thus giving a higher change that a taskswap is performed in this timeframe. Beware that i am just guessing here !. But to shortly answer your question, no, i haven't been able to make a program that shows this behaviour on my PC. sorry about that. (the same program that fails on the slower machine passes on a faster machine. What is notable is that the waitpid is passed, it returns immediately so waitpid sees that the process is ended. Still a zombie appears. Hope this was of any help .. . . . Grtz Dries Pruimboom -- <End of message>