cron goes mad?

[Dave Alden]

Hi,
  I've got the exact same problem.  :-(  The load on this workstation is
up to 478.  :-)  I received no mail fron cron and there is nothing out
of the ordinary in any of the logfiles in /var/log.  I did a:

find / -xdev -name core | xargs ls -ld

and there are no core files from within the last week.  All 478 of the
CROND processes were started yesterday (January 14th).  crond died
somewhere between 16:40:00 and 16:56:25 (when I noticed the problem and
did a /etc/init.d/crond restart).  I have a process that runs every
5 minutes and it's last entry was at 16:40:00 in /var/log/cron.

I tried doing an strace to both a "do_for" process (parent process) and
its child the "coredu" process, both of them just sat there with no
information.

I'm at a complete loss.

...dave