Defunct processes with 1.5.25-15; seemingly reproducible

Fri Nov 27 03:43:00 GMT 2009

It is my understanding that this problem is not easily reproducible.
Well, I've been reproducing it locally since last night.  I'm going to
try leaving every cygwin-related process as-is as long as necessary,
in the hope of beating this problem into submission.
The problem:
$ ps
     PID    PPID    PGID     WINPID  TTY  UID    STIME COMMAND
...
    4164    1288    7684       5504    6 1003 23:49:20 <defunct>
    5392    3224    5984       6100    5 1003 23:49:06 <defunct>
    1452    5240    5984       8104    5 1003 23:49:06 <defunct>
    5240    3224    5984       4532    5 1003 23:49:06 <defunct>
...
$ kill 4164
bash: kill: (4164) - No such process
The PIDs seem to be the same every time this happens.  Specifically, I
have seen 5240 and 1452 every time.  Whether that's significant, I
don't know.
They all seem to be child processes from a long-running gnuplot
process which creates hundreds---often thousands---of graphs per
session.  They do not prevent gnuplot from completing.  They do
prevent me from opening some of the output files.  Once I kill a
process, its file lock is released, and so far all of the affected
files seem to be just fine.
If anyone would care to pursue this, I will be as helpful as I can.
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