lately, i've been noticing that i've been getting the following from ps aux:
kftpd <defunct>
khttpd <defunct>

which doesn't really bother me unless i have the root partition on rw. if the process becomes a zombie while root is rw, its impossible to make it ro again. any ideas as what would cause these?

Really? I wouldn't expect that a zombie would affect anything other than wasting a slot in the process table. Then again, I don't know about how kernel threads work here.

Mark has stuff to say about those zombies.

Hmm... I'm not sure when a process's open file descriptors get closed. I would have thought it was when the process died, but I'm not expert there. Maybe it's possible that the parent process (in this case the kernel itself) actually maintains the fd's for the khttpd/kftpd threads, and only releases them when it gets around to cleaning up after them.

In my knowledge (which is more SVR4-based than Linux-based), normal user processes are totally dead and doing nothing more than taking up space when they are zombies. But it doesn't seem unreasonable that that might not be the case for kernel threads.

We need to get Mark off that mountain.