root fsck dups

[Doug Gladden CD-SP]

Recently, we've been plagued with our nightly fsck reporting two inodes
claiming to own the same duplicate block on the root file system on several of
our BBN C70 System V machines with 167M Ampex drives.

/etc/wtmp or even worse /etc/passwd are often involved, resulting in a lot of
effort in cleaning up the filesystem and recreating the files.

Dups rarely occur on /usr or /tmp and seem to appear on / during peak periods.

Can an application program or broken utility like passwd create this mess or
must this result from a kernel or hardware failure?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.