Daemon processes

I am running on AIX 5.3 and oracle 10.1.0.4. I have been using dbms_pipe to run our daemon code to spawn off calls to the os from pl/sql for 10 years. Something is now wrong. The daemon starts fine. No errors. Says 'Connected and waiting'. We use it once and it works fine. With the 2nd try, it stops working and throws error - ora-20011 and a -1, and then we kill it and restart it and it works fine for one more time.

One thing we noticed is that the os is showing only one daemon process. Top sessions is showing over 25 daemon processes. I kill the os process and the sessions in oracle goes down by one but the rest remain. I would have thought that oracle would remove the sessions if they were dead. What am I missing?

I have filed a TAR with oracle but was wondering if anyone else has seen this.
L.

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