Hi

I have some processes (custom processes for customers) that doesnt get killed when i issue the command "kill -9 (PID)". I cant kill the PPID since its the init process. When i issue this command i dont get any information about any errors when trying to kill the process. A restart of the machine would take of this, but its not something i can do right now. Any ideas on how to kill processes that doesnt get killed with the -KILL signal (-9) ? This signal is suppose to kill everything "in its path".

init can't/won't reap the process if it has children. The process [the one you signalled] will go away when the last of it's children exit. Look for other processes with parent-PID matching the process you're trying to kill... kill them too (or decide they should be allowed to finish.)

either way, once you kill-9 it, the process has no resources to speak of.

-c

At least two kind of processes (regarding their status) cannot be killed: "defunct" and "in uninterruptible sleep". Defunct processes (also known as zombies) are childs whose parents do not receive notification about their fate: if the child dies and the parent does not take care of it, the only way to kill a zombie (without rebooting) is to quit or kill the parent (as cconstantine said).
A process in uninterruptable sleep is often a process waiting from a signal from a piece of hardware: if the hardware fails to send the signal, the process sleeps forever, unless you can manually restore the problem. For example, it can happen with floppy drivers and ejecting/reinserting the floppy disk could solve the situation.
You can check the status and the parenthood of the processes with the following ps command
as an example, at this very moment I have a zombie generated from firefox and the related output from the above command is
The third column is the status: Z means zombie, D means uninterruptible sleep. Hope this will help.