Comment 34 for bug 295405

I have the same problem as David on 2008-11-28. Instead of an update, I had major, hardware-induced series of crashes. After hardware repair I saw identical problems, i.e. all D-BUS dependent applications refusing to run, all the earlier-reported symptoms, including this:

# cat etc/passwd |grep messagebus
messagebus:x:102:107::/var/run/dbus:/bin/false

#cat etc/group |grep messagebus
messagebus:x:106:messagebus

I have now hand-edited /etc/passwd, results will follow.