Firefox and Mozilla issues with NetBoot clients

Colleagues within my organization are having issues with both FireFox
v1.0.7 and Mozilla v1.7.12 when used by NetBoot clients. The clients
get the following message when they select the default profile or
create a new profile (with or without an existing Firefox/Mozilla
preferences directory):

Firefox:

FireFox can not use the profile "default" because it is in use.

Please choose another profile or create a new one.


Mozilla:

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


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.

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!