Passwd fails - what went wrong?

[Ramasubramanian Ramesh <rramesh@ti.com>]

Hi,

 I have not changed passwd or added user for quite some time. This has 
been the case across several apt-get upgrades. Finally when I got to a 
point I wanted to setup an account, I ran into the following difficulty.

   lata [root] 54 > adduser lata
   Adding user lata...
   Adding new group lata (1002).
   Adding new user lata (1002) with group lata.
   Creating home directory /home/lata.
   Copying files from /etc/skel
   passwd: Authentication token manipulation error
   adduser: `/usr/bin/passwd lata' returned error code 10.  Aborting.
   Cleaning up.
   Removing directory `/home/lata'
   Removing user `lata'.
   Removing group `lata'.
   groupdel: group lata does not exist

I suspect one of the upgrades have subtly changed something. I am not 
sure what it is. All other things (that I tried) seem to work. Can you 
tell me what is broken? How to fix it?

Thanks and Regards
Ramesh