Comment 4 for bug 592114

I appear to have this problem too, with cron not starting up at boot since upgrade from Karmic to Lucid. (Well to be precise I noticed this a couple of weeks after the upgrade after only sporadic use of the machine, I don't know if it stopped working directly because of the upgrade or stopped later due to something else happening.)

I've tried the workaround that Jim Carroll posted above with no success.

One thing I wanted to note was that like Jim I too am seeing this on an HTPC box running an XBMC session (i.e. it boots directly into the XBMC app, not a standard Gnome desktop). I wouldn't think that's a particularly common setup but it could just be coincidence as you would think that something like cron would run regardless of what was happening at higher levels like those since it would be used on headless servers, embedded devices etc.

Another common factor that might be affecting this is a number of hard-resets and a series of power failures I experienced, which may have left something in an awkward state.