Strange errors from login

[the wharf rat]

	When I took over my new site, etc/passwd and etc/group were a mess-
logins without home directories, groups that weren't in /group, gid's
assigned at random, etc.  This weekend, I re-organized things, and since
all the users had new id's, I used a shell to change things.
It went something like this:

	cd $1
		for i in `find . -print`
                do
                    chown $1 $i
                    chgrp $2 $i
               done

Now, it worked fine, everyone owns their own files and stuff, but
a handful of users get the message "sh: pwd: cannot open .." when
they login.  When you look at their directories, all the permissions
protections, ownerships, and the like are correct.It happens
in several different file systems, but only to one or two users
in each file system.  No duplicate uid's or anything, either.
I can fix it by copying the user somewhere else, rmdir'ing the old
dir, making a new one, and copying the person back, but what went
wrong in the first place ?  It's an 11/780 running 5.2, if that helps....

                                                 W.rat

ps- I'm not talking about andromeda, just posting from here.