[CentOS] Iptables hangs at shutdown

Hi all-

I have a Centos 3.6 server in production that hadn't been rebooted in  
quite some time.  I was finally onsite today and took the chance to  
reboot into the most current kernel, but the box hung  while  
"stopping iptables".  Some Googling led me to one or two reports of  
systems hanging while the iptables initscript unloaded the modules.

Has anyone else encountered this?  I haven't seen anything in the  
archives to suggest this is a widespread (or even known) problem.   
Because this locks the system where I can't perform any other  
activities, it's near impossible to troubleshoot.  Can anyone point  
to anything in the initscript that I might be able to disable as a  
workaround?

Thanks,

--
Jason Dixon
DixonGroup Consulting
http://www.dixongroup.net