ssh error related to .Xauthority

[Alexandru Cabuz <alexcabuz@wanadoo.fr>]

Hello,

I have two machines running Debian, one at the office, a laptop running Sarge, 
and one at home, an AMD64 Sid box running true64 Sid port.

I have been doing ssh to an fro these two machines plus another machine at the 
office for a few months now no problem, sometimes using  X forwarding 
sometimes not. But as far as X is concerned there should be just two machines 
in this world, my home machine and my work machine.

Today I logged into my laptop from home and I got this

/usr/bin/X11/xauth:  error in locking authority file /home/cabuz/.Xauthority

I did an ls -l on the .Xauthority file and I get this

-rw-------  1 root root 167 2005-04-01 11:01 .Xauthority 

Last modified yesterday, first of april, at 11:01. I don't see why. And 
besides, isn't .Xauthority supposed to be owned by the user? This one seems 
to be owned by root. That's weird.

an xauth list on the office laptop gives a bunch of entries I don't recognize, 
except for the first one, which corresponds to my home machine. But then in 
the list there are like 13 other addresses, all of the form 
bla.bla.abo.wanadoo.fr, the biggest ISP in France (I live in France).

Since my machine at home is also getting kind of weird lately am I right to be 
paranoid and to assume I've been hacked? How can I check?

Thanks.

Alex.