LinuxQuestions.org - Gaim ate memory, couldn't kill processes.

Hi,
I just had to reboot my system because Gaim started eating alot of memory... about 400megs. It spilled out of my system memory and into swap and started eating that too. I'm not sure how long it went on, but I just noticed that alot of memory was being used and I was swapping alot, and went to check it out with ps and pstree and realized that it was Gaim, and that it had opened a couple hundread processes atleast. Gaim eating memroy isn't really the main issue though. What I noticed was that I was unable to kill all these processes that Gaim had aquired. I tried kill -9 on individual processes with no success, there were no errors from kill or killall when trying to kill the process, but when I looked again with ps the process would still be open. I looked around, and many people said that to kill some processes that get hung like this, you must kill the parent process, so I tracked it down, and realized that the Gaim processes's parent was init. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't kill the init process, can I? Or atleast, if I did, wouldn't it hang the entire system? I tried to change runlevels with init, but the system hung up. Could somebody please tell me how I could kill these 'unkillable' processes in the future if they appear right under init? I also had another problem... when ps would get to the Gaim processes in it's list, it would also hang, and I couldn't even control-c out of it, I would have to kill ps's parent process to get it to go away and free up my terminal. As I understand it, ps -aux will put it in a BSD form type list, but -e, being standard syntax, would not hang, and would list all the processes regardless, including the Gaim's. Is there any reason why ps would be hanging when in BSD syntax, but not standard?

Thanks,
Marshall

P.S. I'm running Gentoo linux with a custom compiled 2.6.12.5 linux kernel, and gcc 3.3.5 if that helps any.