> In this case, Postgres had been started in the foreground on a
> terminal, so I went to that terminal, and did a ctrl-c. Eventually,
> postgres stopped, but the terminal wouldn't respond either - and I had
> to close it.
Just out of curiosity, could you maybe have XOFF'd the terminal? I've had
cases in the past where Postgres got unhappy and froze when it couldn't
write logging information to stderr. (Though, granted, in the cases I hit
the server's stderr was redirected to a pipe that was full, so it's not
100% analogous)
-Dan