OK I have figured out what is different and can reproduce this bug. When I first submitted this bug report I did not have the recommended package libpam-ck-connector installed however the problem did not exist in consolekit version 0.4.1-4 without this package installed.
When I did this most recent install I installed libpam-ck-connector. I removed libpam-ck-connector just now and rebooted and the problem returned. It begs the question at what version did this start working again if libpam-ck-connector was the solution. Perhaps libpam-ck-connector should be a depends?
