Jason Flatt writes:
I could not kill the processes and I could not restart the system w/o physically pressing the power button. (I would get an error message at system halt to the effect that the drive was busy.)
That indicates that you are hitting either a kernel bug, or you have a hardware failure. It can't be anything else. All processes, from any application, Courier or otherwise, should be killable, period. And especially when you have unkillable non-root processes. If you've got an unkillable process, root or not, whether it's Courier or anything else, this indicates a major kernel failure.
Does anyone have any clue as to what might be causing this behavior and how I can stop it?
Run diagnostics on your hardware. Sometimes, /var/log/messages might contain clues as to what's exactly is croaking under stress. If not, you have a guessing game on your hands. If memtest finds bad RAM, replace the RAM. Given that your unkillable processes are only the ones that generate network activity, the strongly suggests that your NIC is going bad. Replace the network card, if it's a separate network card. If it's a built-in NIC, add a separate NIC card, they're usually cheap, and see if it fixes the issue.
I mentioned that you might be hitting a kernel bug. That's a possibility, but it would also likely relate to your particular hardware. Most kernel bugs are hardware-related -- a bug in a specific kernel driver. Swapping hardware usually fixes that too, although it's not really a hardware problem, you're just switching out the problematic driver.
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