[Dovecot] dovecot-auth defunct

[Oliver Schulze L.]

Hi,
I'm running dovecot-0.99.11-2.EL4.1 in RHEL4 and a couple of
hours ago, I could not longer login in the imap or pop3 service.

I noted that I have a process like this:
root      8130  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        Z    16:55   0:00 
[dovecot-auth] <defunct>

It this ok to have a defunct proccess? I can not kill this process.
I have to stop the dovecot service, killall pop3-login and imap-login 
and then
start dovecot again.

Is there a solution for this? Any hint? I already enabbled the debug of 
dovecot-auth.
I have my user accounts on a local LDAP using nss_ldap.

Many thanks
Oliver

-- 
Oliver Schulze L.
<oliver at samera.com.py>