is your system correctly usr-merged? (is /bin a symlink to /usr/bin)? was this system upgraded or freshly installed? anything else that is peculiar about it?
Code:
# ls -laF
total 64
drwxr-xr-x 19 root root 4096 Aug 13 09:32 ./
drwxr-xr-x 19 root root 4096 Aug 13 09:32 ../
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 May 12 15:25 bin -> usr/bin/
It's a fairly new install, I have a few Linux VMs and a Win7 Pro VM on it.