Zombie process using CPU

[John Tapsell]

Hi,

  After a program (vuze) crashed I ended up in the situation of having
a process, java, using 100% CPU of a core while also being a zombie.

  Looking in /proc/<pid>/task  I saw two pids - the main task and a
subtask.  The main task (cat /proc/<pid>/task/<pid>/status ) was
indeed a zombie, but the subtask was still running and using CPU.

  I could not find any way to kill this process. kill -9  on the <pid>
 and on the pid on the subtask did nothing.  In the end I had to
reboot.

  is this situation supposed to be possible?  How do I kill a subtask?

John