Passwd problem

I recently upgraded my installation of dockyard-devel cleanly by reinstalling 
rather than using apt-get and I have found that a lot of it works much better 
however there are a few issues I am unable to resolve on my own.

Most importantly I am unable to change passwords using passwd, I have brought 
this up in the irc channel at one point but nobody there could help me fix 
it. The output I get whether running it as root or as a user is almost 
identical:

[arklinux@localhost ~]$ passwd
Changing password for user arklinux.
Changing password for arklinux
(current) UNIX password:
passwd: Module is unknown

running it through gdb doesn't give me any more information:

[root@localhost ~]# gdb passwd
GNU gdb Ark Linux (5.3-1ark)
Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB.  Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "i386-ark-linux"...(no debugging symbols found)...
(gdb) run
Starting program: /usr/bin/passwd
Changing password for user root.
passwd: Module is unknown

Program exited with code 01.
(gdb) backtrace
No stack.
(gdb)  

I have used apt-get to (re)install all of the following packages without any 
success in resolving this problem:
- cracklib
- expect
- pam
- passwd
- pwdb
- setup
- shadow


The other problem I was going to mention is with device icons on the desktop, 
I have configured KDE not to show them but somehow they keep popping up 
anyway and when they do they push icons out of place. This is most likely in 
part because I have my desktop icons set up to line up automatically however 
I much preffer to have a folder pointing to devices:/ than having the icons 
on the desktop. I am also unable to eject CDs with either the button on the 
front of the drive or with the eject command unless I run eject as root.

Finally I am finding myself unable to start Xorg in safe mode, this is 
probably because of the absense of xterm but apt-get seems unable to find 
xterm, if this is the result of switching the save mode over to something 
like konsole then I can wait however if no one intends on fixing this then I 
will probably build my own xterm rpm.

PS. If no one is able to discover the problem with passwd with the information 
given then bero, zdeems or rei_0000 can ssh over to my computer if they want 
to collect more information, I am not however aware of what the root password 
is except that its the one that was on there from the point of installation.

Some time next week a friend of ours will be comming over to look at Linux on 
our computers in order to determine whether he wants to use it, I'm glad Ark 
Linux is working so well now and its going to be one of the distributions 
I'll be showing him.