[ale] Unresponsive orphaned processes (PPID of 1)

[jb at sourceillustrated.com (John Wells)]

I know I asked this question some time ago, but didn't get a definitive
answer and my googling has reaped nothing so far.

What can you do to kill a process that has been orphaned, or is orphaned
when you try to kill it?  Occasionally, I see this with different
processes, most often multimedia and probably IO bound.  The only reponse
you get from kill -9 is the process dropping it's PPID and switching it to
1, if it hadn't already been switched to 1.  Nothing seems to kill it.  It
simply won't respond to the kill sigs.

I've occasionally had to resort to rebooting in order to rid myself of
these processes and free up the resources they're blocking access to. 
There *HAS* to be a better way.

Anyone know?

Thanks,
John