ipop3d process locked

[Cosmin Curticapean]

Hello

i have an issue with an email account: I am not able to access it. Looking
into the sendmail log file, and the messages are these:

Nov 17 19:27:43 XXXXXX ipop3d[20653]: pop3 service init from X.X.X.102
Nov 17 19:27:43 XXXXXX ipop3d[20660]: Trying to get mailbox lock from
process 20653
Nov 17 19:27:57 XXXXXX ipop3d[20660]: Mailbox is open by another process,
access is readonly
Nov 17 19:27:57 XXXXXX ipop3d[20660]: Mailbox /var/spool/mail/XXX is locked,
will override in 300 seconds...

when i run top command, i see this process:

16297 xxx 25   0 12852  12M  1544 R    96.6  1.2 559:27 ipop3d

which is the process that locked the email account xxx.

I've tried so far to kill the process, kill -9, killall ipop3d stop and
start sendmail and xinetd but the process remains there. Can anyone give me
an advice on how to stop that process? As you can see from the top command,
its using 97% of the cpu also...

Cosmin