ipsec/openswan: prosess "ip xfrm state" hangs after connection attempt

I cannot find any error messages or any other kind of information in
any logs.

I have set up ipsec.conf and ipsec.secrets according to a howto I
found via www.openswan.org. Everything seems ok, I can restart the
ipsec service and everything.

Then someone tries to connect. This always fails without error
messages. After that there's a process with CMD column named "ip
xfrm state" that hangs. It is not possible to restart the service,
it won't even die with kill -9. The only way to get that service
away is to boot the machine. It won't even shut down cleanly, so
i have to use the on/off-switch.

Details:

System: RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 U1 x86_64
openswan version 2.3.1

--
Rolf Arne Schulze
Min Weblog: http://rolfas.net/