Comment 16 for bug 160862

so what are the plans to fix this error for the 9.04 LTS version? or is it not reproducible for anyone else?

i also found out that my other odd errors are from my mangled /etc/passwd file. what happened is that the System -> Users and Groups basically made my groups file the same as the one attached by fishexe on 2007-11-07 and also changed all my users's groups in my /etc/passwd file to 65534 (nobody) when i added my new unprivileged user. Unfortunately the backup in /var/backups of the passwd file was also mangled.

eg:
  root:x:0:65534:/root:/bin/bash
should be on my system
  root:x:0:0:/root:/bin/bash

i traced this down since i could no longer get into the Users and groups applet to try and reproduce the problem. i would get the error "The configuration could not be loaded" "you are not allowed to access the system configuration"

if i try to add a new unprivileged user with a long password (48 chars in this case) it will basically mess up all my groups as stated above. i just tried it again and it happened again. so for me it's reproducible. is there somewhere i need to go to report this for 9.04 LTS?

sorry for the verbose message but i want anyone else seeing this problem to be able to find this post and fix it.