On two of our Redhat 5.2 machines, we has experienced a
crasy /sbin/init.

We discovered that the machines had lots of zombi processes.
'ps axl' on other machiens tells me that init normally
rests in 'do_select'.  On the problematic machines, it
rested in 'pause', and did not respond to any signals.

The zombi processes was a result of init not collecting
its childs.

I beleave this has happended when the machines in question
went out of free memory - a runaway netscape.  rwhod,
syslogd and crond was also dead.

init should not go crasy in any case, so the problem should
be fixed.