Thanks,
That sure sounds like the problem. When I was trying to figure out what was wrong (web server hung) I noticed that postgres would still show the tables in psql as being in the database but I couldn't do any operation on the tables like select etc. The select would just hang - almost certainly because of an exclusive lock/deadlock problem. As soon as I get caught up with some paying work that I have at the moment - I'll replicate the problem and check the locks. If your theory is correct I'll try to figure out a fix and post it as soon as I can.
Andrei