But when I restart xinetd and check the
status, I see:

xinetd dead but pid file exists

I had this problem with a bunch of programs and determined it was when the stop function of the daemon was ran it failed and there for the pid file in /var/run/??.pid was still there. First try to kill the file. rm /var/run/xinetd.pid
then restart the daemon. If this does not work reinstall xinetd as it is too teidious to track it down.

I recently caused this problem for myself when I tried to get swat to work. Yeah, I killed the var/run/xinetd.pid file, but I just kept getting the error message.

Rather than reinstall, I just removed the line I had inserted into the /etc/xinetd.conf file, which was
#swat stream tcp nowait.400 root /usr/sbin/swat swat
If you too are trying to get swat working, adding that line isn't the way to do it in RedHat 9!

In case your xinetd.conf file is mangled beyond reconigition, here's how my (working) conf file looks:

#
# Simple configuration file for xinetd
#
# Some defaults, and include /etc/xinetd.d/

defaults
{
instances = 60
log_type = SYSLOG authpriv
log_on_success = HOST PID
log_on_failure = HOST
cps = 25 30
}

includedir /etc/xinetd.d