ps -ef hangs on linux-2.4.9

[trkannan76]

Hello ,
       I am running a multithreaded daemon on the 2.4.9 kernel. One of
the threads of the daemon is getting a SIGSEGV. After this when I tried to
find the process state using the command:
   $ ps -ef
   This just hangs, Ctrl-C or Ctrl-Z also does not interrupt this. The
only option I have is to reboot machine.
   When I did a strace on the same command, I found out that ps -ef , was
hanging when it tried to read from the /proc/<pid of killed daemon>/*.
   Is there any way I can reset the /proc directory without rebooting the
machine. After this , even the killall -9 does not work , even this
command hangs.
   Any help will be of real great value. Thank you for the help.

Regards,
Kannan