this is insanely dangerous and will break *worse* with this disabled. Safe operation *requires* the use of the fork hooks to ensure that the mutexes are owned by the thread calling fork() *and* the child is able to clean up the connection properly.

This is likely just masking the error or causing a different kind of broken behavior. The latest release of zk-1.9.3 & zookeeper-1.4.8 have fixes for the event delivery system that we believe caused the deadlocks (@eric has been running them with success in production for several weeks)

You *must* install the fork hooks for correct operation in forking environments.