[Dovecot] Process died to early

Just went through this again today. Has anyone found a solution?

After several days of operation, POP connections fail to my server. The log message is

Mar 27 15:51:46 ciscy dovecot: Login process died too early - shutting down

Linux ciscy.sterndata.com 2.4.22-1.2174.nptl #1 Wed Feb 18 16:38:32 EST 2004 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

]# /usr/sbin/dovecot --version 0.99.10

# /etc/init.d/dovecot status dovecot (pid 6900) is running...

Killing the dovecot process, deleting /var/lock/subys/dovecot, and restarting the process gets POP3 and IMAP working again.

Suggestions?

Steve