defunct postmasters

Hi

I am running postgres7.1 on redhat 6.2 and my database has gone belly up.

I know i am not supposed to "kill -9 " the postmaster, but it has become
completely unresponsive. pgsql just hangs as does stopping with the
rc.d script.

ps output looks like this, and top shows the machine to be almost
completely idle.
postgres 29214 1 0 Apr11 ? 00:00:02 [postmaster]
postgres 29350 29214 0 Apr11 ? 00:01:02 [postmaster <defunct>]
postgres 29351 29214 19 Apr11 ? 19:11:41 [postmaster <defunct>]
postgres 29352 29214 0 Apr11 ? 00:00:00 [postmaster <defunct>]
postgres 31002 29214 15 Apr30 ? 17:07:27 [postmaster <defunct>]
postgres 31003 29214 0 Apr30 ? 00:01:06 [postmaster <defunct>]
postgres 7726 29214 0 May10 ? 00:01:28 [postmaster <defunct>]
postgres 7727 29214 1 May10 ? 00:12:07 [postmaster <defunct>]

I have tried sending the postmaster a regular "kill" without success.

Does anyone have a suggestion for how to restart postgres short of a
kill -9.

There are not any clients connected anymore, so I assume that it is as
quiet as it can get.

thanks,
Philip

PS I don't know why this happened, but the only theory I have is that I am
running with -i to allow jdbc connections and I had port scanned the
machine with nmap shortly before noticing that I could no longer connect.
Maybe just coincidence as I don't know if I could connect before
portscanning or not, but I have seen other daemons crash after being
port scanned.