Oracle 9i on RH Linux 8: exp hangs

Nothing fancy:

exp user/pass@instance file=foo.dmp compress=N

does this....

Export: Release 9.2.0.1.0 - Production on Wed Nov 12 17:13:24 2003

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Connected to: Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.1.0 - Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Oracle Data Mining options
JServer Release 9.2.0.1.0 - Production
Export done in US7ASCII character set and AL16UTF16 NCHAR character set
server uses WE8ISO8859P1 character set (possible charset conversion)
. exporting pre-schema procedural objects and actions
. exporting foreign function library names for user WOOD
. exporting PUBLIC type synonyms
. exporting private type synonyms
. exporting object type definitions for user WOOD
About to export WOOD's objects ...
. exporting database links
. exporting sequence numbers
. exporting cluster definitions

...and then just sits there forever. (I mean hours.) From the OEM console I can see the process is "status: ACTIVE". When my patience is exceeded I try the 'Kill session' button in OEM console. It marks the process as "status: KILLED". But nothing changes.

From the command line, I see the following: (exp is called from inside the 'snapshots.sh' running)

USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 32090 0.0 0.0 4104 956 pts/0 S 17:07 0:00 su - oracle
oracle 32091 0.0 0.1 4872 1692 pts/0 S 17:07 0:00 -tcsh
oracle 32142 0.0 0.1 4144 1084 pts/0 S 17:13 0:00 /bin/sh -x ./snapshots.sh
oracle 32146 0.0 0.4 12956 5056 pts/0 S 17:13 0:00 /u01/app/oracle/product/9.2.0.1.0/bin/exp file=/usr/lo
oracle 32150 0.6 1.6 158040 17472 ? S 17:14 0:00 ora_s001_ora9

thoughts?
-c