lingering session causing shutdown immediate to hang

I have a strange problem on Oracle 10g/Red Hat Enterpirse 3

One of the user's session was accessing some procedure in her own schema, which was preventing her from recompiling it. I tried to do "Alter system kill session 'sid, serial#', but the session does not die, it just got marked as "killed". I waited 40 minutes for that session to die, and finally gave up and used UNIX command "kill -9" to terminate her OS process. Strangely, the session still shows up in v$session.

I then tried to restart the instance by issuing "shutdown immediate", and the database hanged (it was hanging for the past hour and half). This is really strange, since there were no active transaction before I tried to shut the database down, I'd expect the database would be down fairly quickly. And no, no one was trying to logon while I was performing the shut-down.

It seems the only alternative is to perform "shutdown abort" and then instance recovery. But what should I do if startup hangs after the database got shutdown abnormally?

Thanks for your help Received on Tue Nov 30 2004 - 16:01:28 CST