Strange syslog behaviour

[Ben Goodstein <question1@flat99.com>]

I am running Debian Woody 3.0r2 and have recently noted my system
behaving strangely. In my daily email from the Cron Daemon I have
noticed the following appearing:

/etc/cron.daily/sysklogd:
cat: /proc/197: No such file or directory
cat: 8/cmdline: No such file or directory

eventually the same thing happens with /etc/cron.weekly, i.e.:

/etc/cron.weekly/sysklogd:
cat: /proc/197: Invalid argument
cat: 8/cmdline: No such file or directory

At this point, the daemon stops logging and most of my running processes
go into a SW state, and the system slowly becomes unusable (I am unable
to run perl, or access my mysql databases for instance). At this point I
cannot even reboot gracefully as the shutdown scripts cannot kill the
sleepwait processes.

Can anyone suggest what might have gone wrong with sysklogd or the
logrotate scripts?

Thanks,

Ben Goodstein