Comment 8 for bug 162710

The missing configuration item, as per http://live.gnome.org/GnomeKeyring/Pam, seems to be as follows:

In /etc/pam.d/passwd, add a line like this to the 'password' block:
    password optional pam_gnome_keyring.so

Once I added this line, the problem was resolved on both my Intrepid x64, and my son's Intrepid 386. It appears that simply making this line a standard part of the default Ubuntu installation would fix the issue. All other directives on the Pam page were consistent with my default installation.