NTPD fails at shutdown?

[Anthony Tambourino]

I've been running YDL-2.3 for a couple of months now and everytime I shutdown, it fails to terminate something called ntpd.  It's not that big of a deal, because it "kills" the process a few steps later, but I'd just like to know:

(a) what is it?
(b) why it always fails?
(c) any way to make it not "fail"?

Thanks,

Anthony
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Anthony J. Tambourino
PowerBook G3/333 ("Lombard"), 512 MB RAM, 32 GB IBM drive, YDL-2.3 only