postmaster locking issues

Hello Everybody,
Sorry for mailing at both the addresses. The situation is a nightmare
at our installation facility, hence the need to capture as much attention as
possible.
We are using PostgreSQL 7.0 along with Enhydra 3.0 application server
to host a web site. It has been observed that sometimes (can't pinpoint when
it starts) the postmaster instance 'hangs' and another starts. Then the new
one hangs and another starts. This happens until the max limit for backends
is reached (32 in our case). Then the whole application crashes.
After some debugging in our code, we have come to the conclusion that
this problem could be due to some internal locking problem in Postgres.
This issue of the locking abilities of the postmaster has been
discussed before (see the reference section below). However, it seems that
it was dropped without any action plan, especially the part about point 3 :
"Two PID files will be necessary, one to prevent mulitple instances of
postmasters from running against the same data base, and one to prevent
multiple instances from using the same port."
Can anybody point us in the right direction? Thanks in advance.

References:
http://www.postgresql.org/mhonarc/pgsql-hackers/1998-10/msg00295.html
This is the first mail in the thread by Bill Allie.

Thank You,
Suchet Singh,
IMRglobal Corp.

P.S. Please mail any suggestions to suchet_singh(at)hotmail(dot)com
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