Comment 22 for bug 138957

It works for me consistently after applying the change of ownership (thank you, by the way). Are you current on updates (I am), and have you applied the thinkfinge code from the PPA (I have not, yet, since I haven't checked to see exactly what was changed).

$ dpkg -l | grep thinkfinger
ii libpam-thinkfinger 0.3+r118-0ubuntu3
ii libthinkfinger0 0.3+r118-0ubuntu3
ii thinkfinger-tools 0.3+r118-0ubuntu3

See also Bug 256429.