reconstruction stalls

i86 2.4.17 kernel
2 - 1de 20 gig western digital drives on separate channels (ASUS-me99)
There are several raid partitions on this drive, one managed to get out of
sync when the cpu failed. The ext2 file system is fine but the arrray will
not reconstruct -- I have 7 linux boxes running various flavors or raid 1
and 5 for several years, and this is the first time I've seen anything
like this.

The reconstruction proceeds until /proc/mdstat says 99.9% complete
(2015872,2015936) finish 0.0 min
then the speed keeps going down with each successive query. There is no
disk activity per the "red" light. Tried this twice with identical results
each time.

Any suggestions??

Michael