Postgres will not shutdown?

Hello,

I've had a number of problems with Postgres in passed few days.
First ,I had an issue with a corrupt index.  One solution required
that I stop and start postgres so it would read the postgresql.conf
file.  It looked like it was stopping but it wasn't.  I finally had
to kill the processes.  The problem was that postgres didn't thing
the pg_ctl was running.  Then I realized I had not set the parameter
that I needed to set quite high enough so I had to stop and restart
it again.  It didn't stop again but this time I got the following
message:

# /etc/init.d/cswpostgres stop
Stopping PostgreSQL database...
waiting for server to shut
down...............................................................
failed
pg_ctl: server does not shut down

Can anyone help unravel this?

Thanks in advance,

Carol