Incomplete Startup Packet

Some time ago, I accidentally did a kill -9 on the postmaster (yes, I
know, I know), when trying to kill -9 one of the child processes (er,
yeah, probably bad too). This turned out to be pretty bad for us. It put
the database in a bad state. I had to run some kind of hacky command (I
don't recall which one) to even get postgres to start up again. Since
then, the log file is littered with:

LOG:  incomplete startup packet

I am ok with the fact that the abrupt killing of the postmaster may have
corrupted some data. It is not a mission critical data we're talking
about. But I'm left with some questions -

Is my database hosed? Does this necessitate a full reinstall of
postgres? While not mission critical data, there is a lot of it, and
many dbs in the cluster which would mean hours of data loading. (The
database seems to be functioning just fine, but I seem to recall reading
that a reinstall is recommended, though I forget why)

- Mott

As a side question, probably unrelated -- i understand that kill -9
postmaster is bad, but how bout killing a child process (a client)? I've
noticed that if you kill a child process, it seems to kill all child
processes and reboot (like a SIGUP?) [I was doing this in order to kill
a hanging transaction.]