I had the same situation here, it turns out it was a stuck useradd process - 
destroying it got useradd working again, something like this: 

killall -9 userdel 
rm -f /etc/*lock 

In my case the stuck useradd was caused by a bug in my own script, but 
for the others, if it was caused by the package manager then I guess there 
might be a package out there with a bug in it's call to useradd.

-- 
useradd: cannot lock /etc/passwd; try again later.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/523896
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