Who and write not working as before

[MR ZenWiz]

I recently installed Xubuntu 12.04 on my home desktop where I was
previously running Ubuntu 10.10, and something strange is now
happening - who and write don't work the way they used to.

1) 'who' by itself displays nothing at all.  With 'who -a', I get this:

$ who -a
          system boot  2012-06-16 12:57
          run-level 2  2012-06-16 12:57
LOGIN      tty4         2012-06-16 12:57              1081 id=4
LOGIN      tty5         2012-06-16 12:57              1087 id=5
LOGIN      tty2         2012-06-16 12:57              1094 id=2
LOGIN      tty3         2012-06-16 12:57              1095 id=3
LOGIN      tty6         2012-06-16 12:57              1097 id=6
LOGIN      tty1         2012-06-16 12:57              1317 id=1

This is not helpful, as you might guess.

2) Worse, write does not seem to work at all.  If I write to myself, I
get a message that I'm not logged in.

What am I missing?

MR ZenWiz