how do you kill a zombie?

[nishtya]

stake through heart? no, that's vampires. Anyway I am messing about with bleeding edge KDE 3.3 and equally bleeding edge Baghira 5.d compiled from source and occasionally control center goes kaput on me. I will get an error message "from" kwin asking if I want to kill the process, I do but control center cannot be started again without restarting KDE. Top summary shows 1 zombie process but I do not see it listed. And shouldn't it have been killed prior? Or is this a new zombie? Help with zombie extermination is appreciated until KDE and Bahira play nicer. Thanks

[Markus]

You can try with ps -Af or ps -auxf and look for the PPID to kill the parent process with kill -9 PID, kill -HUP PID or kill -SIGHUP PID. If this is kdeinit or somesuch you obviously have to restart it. Don't know if you can just kill the zombie as it's already terminated. AFAIK the only way is to kill the parentprocess.