Getting lock during commit stalls cvs ci

[reader]

I haven't run into this problem before:

cvs ci -m "" reader/home/reader/scripts/perl/fetchall_wrp.pl
cvs commit: [11:15:42] waiting for reader's lock in
/usr/local/cvsroot/base/reader/home/reader/scripts/perl

I suspected file permission trouble but checking the files I see they
both belong to reader and the containing directory as well

ls -la shows:
 drwxrwxr-x   4 reader users   2704 Jan 31 05:17 .
 drwxrwxr-x  10 reader users   2344 Jan 31 05:12 ..
 [...]
 -r-xr-xr-x  1 reader users 1698 Sep 23  2004
 /usr/local/cvsroot/base/reader/home/reader/scripts/perl/\
 fetchall_wrp.pl,v

And it is root doing the commit anyway.  I've enabled-rootcommit at
compile time since its a single user machine, root and user are always
the same thing.

Anyone know what the error means?