I have a similar problem like it was on question Memcached status returning "memcached dead but pid file exists" but I can't solve it.
My Nagios client is CentOS 6.4 and NRPE won't work after power outage (which forcedly stopped CentOS). When I type, I get the following:
/sbin/service nrpe status
nrpe dead but pid file exists
Also, file /var/run/nrpe.pid has the process id, but when trying to kill it, I get:
-bash: kill: (3879) - No such process
and on /var/lock/subsys/ I have empty nrpe file. So, please help me to solve this issue.