Comment 17 for bug 523896

It's been suggested that this might be a duplicate of bug 432964, which is described as "system crash in guest session locks /etc/passwd forever". Can the submitters of this bug and duplicates confirm whether they've used Ubuntu guest sessions on the affected system, and whether they saw crashes when doing so?

Nicolas, you comment in the other bug that we shouldn't clear locks on boot because they indicate something has gone wrong and shouldn't be ignored. While that's true, the trail on bugs like this is likely to be quite cold, and knowing the lock is there gives us only a slim chance of finding the cause. Since updates to these files are atomic and the lock files are used only to prevent two updates in parallel clobbering one another, there should be no file corruption and removing the locks should be safe - so I am inclined to say we should remove the locks at boot.