spamass-milter goes to stop state?

[Tony Shadwick]

I've been wrestling with this for months and I'm just now getting around 
to dealing with it.

I have a pair of mail exchangers that experience a pretty heavy load. 
There doesn't appear to be one particular cause that trips this, but at 
random times, sometimes days or even weeks apart, the spamass-milter 
process will go to "Stop" state (at least that is what `top` says) on 
FreeBSD 5.3.  Doing `kill -9 (pid)` doesn't do it.  There's no way to kill 
it other than rebooting the system.

Any ideas what might trigger this?  System specs are different on both 
machines, but both are running the most current 5.3 kernel sources 
available, however this has happened on every kernel we've built. :\  We 
use generic sources, enabling SMP on one, and the other not.

Help?  Side question, anything I can use as a watchdog daemon that would 
notify me when it goes to that state via e-mail?  I'm looking for a daemon 
to just check on it every so often.