Unfinished and Defunct Processes

Hi,

Any suggestions for what might cause process to not finish.

e.g. rm and egrep

The processes look like this:

root 117 1 0 Oct30 ? 00:00:00 rm -f /etc/mtab~ /etc/mtab~~
root 126 1 0 Oct30 ? 00:00:00 rm -f /lib/modules/preferred
root 128 1 0 Oct30 ? 00:00:00 rm -f /lib/modules/default
root 143 1 0 Oct30 ? 00:00:00 egrep -s ^alias[[:space:]]+sound
root 144 143 0 Oct30 ? 00:00:00 [egrep ]
root 155 1 0 Oct30 ? 00:00:03 grep -i confirm /proc/cmdline
root 167 1 0 Oct30 ? 00:00:00 touch /var/lock/subsys/kudzu
root 171 167 0 Oct30 ? 00:00:00 [touch ]
root 1096 1 0 Oct30 ? 00:00:00 touch /var/lock/subsys/xfs
root 1112 1096 0 Oct30 ? 00:00:00 [touch ]

The rm's and grep's are from from rc.sysinit and the touch's from starting run-level specific stuff.

When the machine is shutdown it fails to unmount root as it is still busy.

When booting up i have to do an fsck on the file systems off a rescue disk. But then
when i boot properly the problem appears again.

I have a tape backup which i can reload but am worried that it will carry over with the backup.

Any ideas.

Thanks
Carl

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