>I've added a -h flag to my local vipw. vipw -h creates home directories
>for all users that do not have a home.=20

Sorry but this strikes me as a bad idea.  Better to do this in a tool
that might use vipw or useradd.  My adduser script will create and 
populate home dirs if desired, but there's a big difference b/w
"add this user and create a home for him" and "create any missing
homes".  The later would likely cause more problems than it solves, and
to make it do otherwise would require considerable extra code in
vipw.

--sjg