samba - Sep 2005 - samba 3.0.14 fails on boot, getpwnam cannot find nobody

I have been trying to get a share running for public access to part of a 
workstations hard disk. Realise now that this is not possible at 
userlevel security without a username, password pair. Part of my playing 
around involved creating on the machine user nobody, then setting guest 
account = nobody in samba.conf. Once realising i needed a passwrd pair I 
  smbpasswd -X nobody and then userdel nobody from my machine as a 
prefix to setting up a valid user/pssword. Now samba fails on boot with 
the log reading

auth/auth_util.c:make_server_info_sam(840)
User nobody in passdb but getpwnam() fails!

Checking passdb with pdbedit shows no users present

This problem is solved by creating a user account on the machine 
(useradd nobody), but I don't want spare users floating around as they 
are a security risk, particularly with such an obvious username.

I am running gentoo linux

Thanks for any help in this matter.

Huw