Thanks for your responses Guys....
Problem solved..... BTW I did change the password as I had access to the root via sudo, however it still instisted that the account had expired. Then I realised lsuser -f root was showing an expiry date of the epoch even tho it was not set anywhere. I then explicitly set expire=0 in the root stanza in /etc/security/user which did the trick.
Basically, AIX seems to disable an expired account when maxexpire is reached
by setting (where I dont know!) the expire date to epoch
I agree about maxexpire for root.. but sometimes corporate settings over-rule good sense!
