Comment 5 for bug 291613

I ran across this same problem as well with installing sysvinit on Gutsy (7.10), Hardy (8.04) and Intrepid (8.10). With all systems unresponsive to reboot (most of them remote servers) yielding the same error as stated above. Couldn't find any associated process to hup, restart or even kill. As a last resort, I ran reboot -f (force) and the problem seems to have gone away. Systems reloaded and now reboot and halt like they should. They are responding just fine and I haven't seen the 'initctl' unresponsive error since.