During "its bad, but not that bad" situations over the last couple decades I've had positive results with dropping the init level to single user mode "1" and th

During "its bad, but not that bad" situations over the last couple decades I've had positive results with dropping the init level to single user mode "1" and then going back to normal multiuser mode which historically could be any number "2", "3", or "5". Obviously this doensn't help with processes stuck in a kernel call. But for other sorts of malfunctions, or simply testing init scripts and their dependency tree, there's really no reason to reinit the kernel and check the filesystem and all that, and it can be very fast compared to a complete boot process. This is not exactly a "gui-generation" solution for problems, but it has occasionally helped very quickly clean things up.