Hi Vernon,
could you try disabling the [larrdcolumn] and [infocolumn] tasks in your hobbitlaunch.cfg ? These are no longer used, and I suspect that the code in hobbitd that handles these messages is somewhat flaky.
If hobbitd refuses to stop, you'll have to do it with a "kill -9". When you do that, please check that there are no ressources left allocated by hobbitd:
login as the hobbit user run "ipcs -m" and "ipcs -s"
If you see something like
hobbit at osiris:~$ ipcs -m
------ Shared Memory Segments -------- key shmid owner perms bytes nattch status 0x01020b1f 482148354 hobbit 600 102400 2 0x02020b1f 482181123 hobbit 600 102400 2 0x03020b1f 482213892 hobbit 600 102400 2 0x04020b1f 482246661 hobbit 600 102400 2 0x05020b1f 482279430 hobbit 600 102400 1 0x06020b1f 482312199 hobbit 600 102400 1
hobbit at osiris:~$ ipcs -s
------ Semaphore Arrays -------- key semid owner perms nsems 0x01020b1f 3276801 hobbit 600 3 0x02020b1f 3309570 hobbit 600 3 0x03020b1f 3342339 hobbit 600 3 0x04020b1f 3375108 hobbit 600 3 0x05020b1f 3407877 hobbit 600 3 0x06020b1f 3440646 hobbit 600 3
then it hasn't cleaned up properly and you should either reboot the box or use "ipcrm -m <shmid>" and "ipcrm -s <semid>" to delete these.
Regards, Henrik