Cron jobs and root account locked on Lenny

A few days ago (due to a broken harddisk) I've installed Lenny from
scratch on my laptop.
I've copied pretty much every configuration from the old installation
(Etch) and everything seems good.

Well, everything but a couple of things: first of all, at install time
I chose "no root login" but only a user with sudo grants. So, the root
account is locked:

alieno <at> klingon:~$ sudo passwd -S root
root L 07/21/2008 0 99999 7 -1

Now, first difference I've noticed from the previous (Etch) install
is:

alieno <at> klingon:~$ sudo su -
Your account has expired; please contact your system administrator
su: User account has expired
(Ignored)
klingon:~#

Ok, not so annoying, but I'm not sure it's the right message:
shouldn't the account be locked and not expired?

Anyway, this leads to the second, more important issue: crond is not
running jobs owned by root. For example:

syslog:
Jul 22 20:17:01 klingon CRON[3060]: User account has expired

auth.log:
Jul 22 12:17:01 klingon CRON[3060]: pam_unix(cron:account): account
root has expired (account expired)

Of course, I could unlock root account, but I thought it was good
practice to avoid root login from tty/ssh etc, and I'm pretty sure
this configuration was working well under Etch. Could this be
considered as a bug? Should I report it?

Thanks