FireFox/Mozilla and SMB homedirs

I have an environment in which all home dirs reside on Linux and
Solaris (soon to be killed) file servers. We have set up a NetBoot
environment for our Mac users that serves home dirs using Samba. This
has worked quite well, with one exception. FireFox (thru 1.5) and
Mozilla (thru 1.7.12) appear to have a file locking issue involving the
profile dir. Whenever one launches either of these apps, they think the
profile is in use. By profile, I mean the default profile, one that is
already created (and not in use), or one that you create via the
'create profile' button during the profile selection at launch.

Firefox gives the following error(default can be substituted by
whichever profile is selected):

"Profile in use Firefox cannot use the profile "default" because it is
in use.

To continue, close the running instance of Firefox or choose a
different profile."


Mozilla gives the following error(default can be substituted by
whichever profile is selected):

"Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)
[nslProfileInternal.currentProfile]"


Creating a new profile results in the same message. I've checked to
make sure it's not a Unix permissions issue.

I have verified the following:

The user's home directory is mounted (via Samba), and they have
permission to write where the profile is/would be stored.

The user can read the default 'template' profile within the Firefox.app
and Mozilla directores in order to create a new profile.

There isn't a lock file in the user's profile dir. Most certainly when
there is no preexisting profile directory.

Using netatalk makes this go away. However, netatalk presents plenty of
other problems, and would be just one more service that we would have
to support.

I've run ktrace, and while I'm not a real programmer, it appears that
it is doing the check for the .parentlock file, not finding it and then
creating it. If someone would be interested in the ktrace.out, that
could be arranged.

Both root and admin accounts can execute both Firefox and Mozilla
without issue (actually, it doesn't ask to choose the profile).
I have gone as far as to chmod a+rwx /Library and /Applications, to no
avail.

This is driving me up the wall....I would really appreciate some help
sorting this out! Anyone have any suggestions/pearls of wisdom?