Hi,
Have a look at this doc for some troubleshooting tips. Also, SXI4a is pretty old and have had its share of issues. You may want to upgrade to SXJ.
The *Dead* Process
The *dead* process is not a real process. It's there to account for the memory allocated under the context of another process which has terminated. The memory allocated to this process is reclaimed by the kernel and returned to the memory pool by the router itself when required. This is the way IOS handles memory. A memory block is considered as dead if the process which created the block exits (no longer running). Each block keeps track of the address and pid of the process which created it. During periodic memory tallying, if the process that the scheduler finds out from a block pid does not match the the process that the block remembered, the block is marked as dead.
Therefore, memory marked as belonging to process *Dead* was allocated under the control of a process that no longer runs. It is normal to have a significant chunk of memory in such a state. Here is an example:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/iosswrel/ps1831/products_tech_note09186a00800a6f3a.shtml
HTH
