MySQL monitor prompt does not return for slave I'm trying to fix a replication error (or an ongoing failure to replicate) between our master and slave MySQL databases.

The procedure I have asks me to use MySQL Monitor to stop the slave.

stop slave;


When I try this, however, the prompt never returns. I've left it for several minutes before Ctrl+C'ing out.

Interestingly, the same thing occurs with:

show slave status;


...but

show master status;


Works fine. Is there some other way I can kill the slave process off, ideally without interrupting the master?
When this happens, I immediately go to the Slave and
If you have MySQL 5.1+
SELECT id FROM information_schema.processlist WHERE user='system user';

This will show you the Process ID of the IO Thread and SQL Thread of Replication.
If you have MySQL 5.0
SHOW PROCESSLIST;

You would have look for the two rows in the display that has 'system user' as the user.
Once you find the IDs...
You can run the KILL or KILL QUERY command against the Process IDs.
CAVEAT
This is a possibility that evn the KILL command can hang if the query must come to a completion (such as a transaction that must fully commit or fully rollback).
Master is oblivious to all this.
Why does SHOW MASTER STATUS; work just fine ???
Running SHOW MASTER STATUS; simply checks for binary logs on the DB Server. There are no DB threads to read, parse, examine, and coalesce.
Running SHOW SLAVE STATUS\G has to reconcile three(3) aspects:

Aspect #1 : the Contents of master.info
Aspect #2 : the current list of relay logs
Aspect #3 : information acquired from the IO and SQL threads (live)

This reconciliation helps produce the output of SHOW SLAVE STATUS\G. It's Aspect #3 that makes SHOW SLAVE STATUS\G freeze attempts to kill the SQL thread on a long running query.