how to remove dead process in the "exiting" state

Mon May 26 04:15:03 PDT 2003

It occured me more times that the process I have tried to remove using
"kill -9" ended in the dead state when ps was showing "IE" status and I
could do nothing with it except rebooting. Do you have any idea, how is it
possible that some process comes to such a strange state ? Do you have any
suggestion how to remove such a process without rebooting ? I'm using
FreeBSD 4.8.

Thank you in advance for your answers.