On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 23:02:20 +0100, Mick wrote:

> After some further investigation it is worth reporting that the problem
> was caused not by knotify, but by kdeinit!
> 
> I exited X and stopped xdm.  Only one knotify4 was left running as well
> as the kdeinit, both pegged at 100% and neither would go away after the
> X session had exited.  I was able to kill -15 the knotify PID, but the
> kdeinit would not shift until I used kill -9.

It's actually kded4 causing the problem, and it is a known issue.
killall -9 kded4 gets things working again.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Death is proven to be 99.9% fatal to all laboratory rats.