fetchmail: lock creation failed

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

With no fetchmail to feed mail to mutt and so no threading I have lost 
the thread and must re-post.

As advised I re-copied /oldhome/tom to /home/tom with tar.  This did not 
solve the problem.

There is no .fetchmail.pid file in /oldhome/tom or anywhere else.

I tried dpkg -- purge fetchmail followed by apt-get -f install 
fetchmail.  This did not solve the problem.

Any more suggestions?

Tom