Ubuntu freezes when I run "ps" or "top"

Question

• Ubuntu 11.10
• Bind9 (not working, won't accept connections) (named-checkconf and named-checkzone both work)
• OpenVPN (community edition) (working correctly) (bridged mode)
• PHP5 & PHP5-gd
• Mysql5
• Standard setup ubuntu server
• Bash shell

Problem

Any command that monitors or reports on running processes causes the shell to repairably freeze. This includes top and ps.

I don't really know where to start on this issue. Any clues would be helpful. Issue started after install bind9 apt-get install bind9 dnsutils

Answer 1

process monitoring tools will still query nss (name resolution layer) to map user ids to names... so problem is likely in the resolver layer...