Tomcat restart issues

[Mohammad Farhat]

Hey guys,
i am having some problems with tomcat; when i start tomcat, it starts correctly, and i can access my website and all. But the problem is with shutting it down. If i shutdown tomcat through ./shutdown.sh, it does shutdown (i can no longer access my files), but the tomcat process is still running (if i try the same thing again, it gives me
Catalina.stop: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused
java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method))
Meanwhile, if i try to restart directly /etc/rc.d/tomcat5 restart(without shutting down before), it hangs while doing this (eventhough again i can no longer access my website)
i will need to manually kill the process, and then run /etc/rc.d/tomcat5 restart which will start tomcat again (or use ./startup.sh)
Anyone has any idea?
thanks a lot guys,
Best,
Mohammad