fetchmail: lock creation failed

["Thomas H. George" <xyz@spininternet.com>]

I am in the process of replacing a failing hard drive.  I copied my home 
directory from the old drive to the new drive with

   cd /oldhome/tom
   cp -Rp .* /home/tom               ( Found by trial and error that .* 
works)

Almost everything works - e.g. mozilla previously undeleted mail - but 
fetchmail which aborts with the "lock creation failed" message.

How can I fix this?

Tom