Comment 11 for bug 303458

I had the same problem on a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.10 amd64.

I followed the instructions given by Thierry Carrez above, and removed samba and libpam-smbpass, deleted /var/lib/samba, created a new empty directory to replace it, and reinstalled samba and libpam-smbpass. Rebooted and all was well.