I have been bitten in similar ways by gdm; on 8.04 and 10.04 gdm would only read /etc/passwd, it would totally ignore nsswitch.conf. The patch to fix this was r

I have been bitten in similar ways by gdm; on 8.04 and 10.04 gdm would only read /etc/passwd, it would totally ignore nsswitch.conf. The patch to fix this was relatively easy to make but annoying nonetheless.