This must be a fairly rare condition, however....
I rebooted a machine. Before shutting down, one of the karaf instances has a PID of 9935, After restarting the machine, a different process had a PID of 9935 (gnome-power-manager, owned by root) After starting the admin instance, it believed that PID 9935 was its process and claimed it was "Started". However when I tried to stop the process it silently failed (as the webconsole appears to do on any failure) To fix this, I stopped the admin instance, edited the instance.properties file and set the pid to 0 and restarted.
