xkilled app takes 100% of CPU

[Arcady Genkin <genkin@sympatico.ca>]

Hi all:

I've experienced the following phenomenon today:

While reading news from Emacs, I clicked on an URL, which opened a
Netscape window. I browsed for some time, and then Netscape hung
because of some Java applet, I think. I couldn't close it the regular
way, so I had to xkill it.

A couple of minutes later I noticed that my CPU load indicator shows
continuous 100% utilization. I ran top, and sure enough, Netscape was
still there consuming resources like hell. I killed it, and it turned
zombie, but another process continued what it was doing - it looked
like a call to Netscape that was executed from Emacs, containing the
actual URL. So this call was PID 362, and Netscape (zombie now)
363.

No matter what signals I sent to 362 and 363, I couldn't change
anything. I tried kill and killall. I had to reboot because I felt
sorry for my poor overworked overclocked Celeron. :)

So, what do you generally do with unkillable apps? I know there must
be a way to do it w/o rebooting.

For what it matters, I run Debian2.1 with 2.2.6, XFree3.3.2,
WindowMaker... Netscape is 4.5

Thanks for any suggestions,
-- 
Arcady Genkin
"I opened up my wallet, and it's full of blood..." - GsYDE