PS/Top broken - /proc entry bad

[Matt Simonsen <matt_lists@careercast.com>]

I had a box where ps and top quit working after hundreds of days uptime.
After doing an strace ps I found that one directory in /proc was hanging
it up, a directory named a 5 digit number which I believe was
associtated with a process of the same name.

I tried doing a kill -9 on the process, it returned fine but the process
was still there. Reboot hung my session, too, I had to use reboot -f to
get the machine healthy again.

Is there any way to "fix" /proc other than what I did? I suppose maybe
going into a lower init level and then back to 3 may have worked. It's a
remote machine, though, so reboot was at the time seemed like a better
solution.

Any comments/suggestions on what to do in this situation?

Thanks
Matt