Comment 12 for bug 147963

Since the Update to Gutsy I have the same problem: most of the time, hald doesnt work.
However, I cannot restart it because I cannot kill it (as root). Thats funny, because according to top, I dont have any zombie processes, so why cant I kill it ?
So hald shows up in ps, but is not responding, e.g.:
>lshal
*** [DIE] lshal.c:dump_devices():285 : Couldn't obtain list of devices

I also tried to mess around with boot priorities in rc2.d, as suggested elsewhere, to no avail. Currently, I have:

>ls -l /etc/rc2.d/*hal
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2007-10-18 20:27 /etc/rc2.d/S12hal -> ../init.d/hal
>ls -l /etc/rc2.d/*dbus
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2007-10-04 21:56 /etc/rc2.d/S12dbus -> ../init.d/dbus

Also, the file

>ls /var/cache/hald/ -l
total 485
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 492408 2007-10-19 00:43 fdi-cache

is present.

This leaves my laptop in a pretty unusable state, any help would be greatly appreciated.
I'll provide any requested information to solve this.
As a workaround, is it possible to downgrade hal in Gutsy ?