to kill a process ?

[Paul E Condon <pecondon@mesanetworks.net>]

I have a process that I see in ps, but cannot kill. 
This is happening on a host running Lenny in a small LAN.

I run this to get a display of processes:
gq:/var/lib/mlocate# ps -Af | less
                   ---------------

In this list I find this line:
root      9398     1  1 04:59 ?        00:03:11 /usr/bin/updatedb.mlocate
          PID    PPID

I issue the following command:
gq:/db2/chkpnt# kill -9 9398
              --------------

I re-run ps as above. The process is still there! What can I do, short of
rebooting? 

Note that the precess was spawned directly from PID==1 and that it is
running that rather special systen program updatedb.mlocate. 

This process is blocking/stopping/whatever every night in the daily
cron. This does NOT happen on two other Lenny machines on the same
LAN. It is not leaving behind any locks that I can find. It is
building a new copy of mlocate.db that seems to be to be much too
large. (There os still plenty of space left on disk when it quits
adding bytes to its new version.) But beyond that, I nesitate to
report details of its misbehavior. Without the ability to kill, it is
very difficult to gather verified evidence.

I want to debug, and, perhaps, file a bug report. But first, I need to
clear the bad process so that I can get on with the debugging.

Is there a different Debian list for this? I am not a developer. I hesitate
to involve them in what could be a very stupid question.

Please help.

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon@mesanetworks.net