Today after a series of autoupdates my Ubuntu 8.04 system greeted my login with this message.

You can imagine I was not terribly please.

But the fix wasn’t bad.  It turns out one of the updates or something done as part of lab testing made my home folder not readable. 

The fix:

sudo chmod 700 /home/yourusername/

If you want other users to be able to read your home folder the fix:

sudo chmod 755 /home/yourusername/