can't initialize cpmi server

[herrmadbeef]

yesterday we were working on a SmarCenter Server on Splat, and suddenly he disconnected us, we couldn't log into the managment any more

we check the disk space and there was no problem
we checked the process and the fwm was using 99% of the cpu, so we proceed to make a cprestart and still the fwm deamon was at 99% of cpu utilization, so we issue a cpstop and review the process the fwm didn't stop so we did a kill PID and nothing so we issue a kill -9 PID and a cpstart

and everything came back on line, we checked $FWDIR/log/fwm.elg
and we found this error

fwm_cmain: error: can't initialize cpmi server

any idea why this might be happening?