17 hours ago, treos said:i don't know if anyone knows how to fix this and it's completely outside my realm of knowledge to even attempt to at all.
Zombie processes can be the result of race conditions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_condition ) or other bugs in the code, or even cosmic radiation (no joke, cosmic radiation can flip bits in your computers memory, though still a very unlikely event to actually harm operation as usually only a small percentage of memory is actually crucial to operation).
Often zombie processes can still be removed if you kill them with root aka administrator privileges, but the difficult thing is to find out that there is a zombie in your system. Many processes don't have a UI that gets unresponsive, so those processes can sit in your memory like a block of concrete and reserve a resource that another program may need (for example specific ports). This can often be seen by inspecting log files (of programs or of the operating system) but not even that is a sure thing.
So actually the best advice in case of strange behaviour of a PC is : reboot and check if the problem still exists.