Unkillable processes?

[Dan Coutu]

Okay, here's a strange one.

On a Red Hat 9 system I've encountered a situation where there are two 
processes that I cannot kill when using kill -9 (or any other value, for 
that matter.)

What's the deal with that? The only kind of process that I've ever run 
across that I could not kill was a zombie and neither one of these is a 
zombie.

Just to add more confusion to the mix, or maybe a useful clue, the 
system load average is about 4 but top shows 97% system idle time. Strange.

Any ideas?

Dan