I have been using linux now for the last 8 years, and recently ran into a situation where I am stumped. It looks like wine (and other programs at random times) deadlocks. The symptoms are:

The wine process does not finish execution.
ps will hang (on a read( ) of /proc/<deadlocked process>/stat)
system cannot be shut down cleanly
wine process cannot be killed

strace wine shows
mkdir("/home/me/.wine-Y1SaMs", 0777) = 0
write(2, "wine: creating configuration dir"..., 61wine: creating configuration directory '/home/me/.wine'...
) = 61
clone(child_stack=0, flags=CLONE_CHILD_CLEARTID|CLONE_CHILD_SETTID|SIGCHLD, child_tidptr=0x4019eac8) = 2289
waitpid(2289,

and stops

This is with yesterday's (29 June 2004) wine CVS. Same thing happens with CVS from 5 May 04, and 1 other prior version (have not checked others).

There is no output to /var/log describing the event. The rest of the system continues to function normally.

This does not seem to be a hardware problem. There are no hardware related symptoms in Linux, and Win2K operates 'as expected.'

My questions are:
Is this deadlock or something else?
What steps should I take to start troubleshooting?
If you have experienced ps hanging, why did it happen and what did you do to fix it?

By the way, this is in Mandrake 10, with:
Mandrake kernel 2.4.25-5mdk
gcc 3.3.2
wine CVS 20040615 (and other programs)
Latest Mandrake updates
and so on

One of the first things I do when confronted by this is to punch the NumLock key and see if the LED on the keyboard changes state. If it's stuck, I cry 'hardware foul'

If something in wine is killing your X session then things are gonna be a bit greasy. What's your load when this happens - can you get a console and get the results from 'uptime' or see what's running in 'top'?

The computer continues to operate normally (except for the ps thing). Numlock flashes, the X session still works, I can even start different programs. It's only 1 process that hangs. The rest of the hardware functions normally.

top, ps, ktop, even an ls of /proc/2177 (example PID) hang. So I can't get a complete list, but I will recreate the error, and post the process list just before the hang. But anything that tries to read("/proc/2177/stat") will hang. strace of the PID before execution shows this.

I can ^C out of strace, but the process cannot be killed.