in reply to spampd hangs occasionaly

I have an email gateway setup as well to protect my Exchange server. However, I use amavisd-new and Spamassassin directly on the server. This way I am not attempting to examine messages that may be rejected due to an invalid user or bounce, etc. etc.

I can't speak towards your issue, but have you considered running spamassassin in a non-proxy setup? It may fix the issue.