ncs-resourced.p in a defunct or zombie state

There are one or more ncs-resourced.p threads that are in a defunct or zombie state.

ps aux | grep ncs-resourced

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root      6114  0.0  0.1   8648  4748 ?        D    Mar24   0:00 /usr/bin/python /opt/novell/ncs/bin/ncs-resourced.py /etc/opt/novell/ncs
root      6812  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    Mar26   0:00 [ncs-resourced.p]<defunct>
root      7015  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    Mar24   0:00 [ncs-resourced.p]<defunct>
root      7016  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    Mar24   0:00 [ncs-resourced.p]<defunct>

This is normal.
The Novell Cluster Services (NCS) resource daemon forks a process to serve a request that may take a while to complete.
NCS will clean up the process before the daemon exits or starts another process the next time.
What you see is the defunct/zombie process left between two such requests.
Novell engineering is working on reducing the number of these defunct processes.