com.solidstatenetworks.awkhost.plist in user's homedir owned by root

So I have a user in an imac running 10.7.5; she is the only person using that imac (I only ssh into it when a problem like this happens). This account is synced using Mobile Account, once at login and then at logout. In this account, every so often the file ~pickles/Library/Preferences/com.solidstatenetworks.awkhost.plist changes ownership to root:

pickles:~ root# ls -lh ~pickles/Library/Preferences/com.solidstatenetworks.awkhost.plist
-rw------- 1 root pickles 109B Jan 21 13:11 /Users/pickles/Library/Preferences/com.solidstatenetworks.awkhost.plist
pickles:~ root#

But, if we look on the fileserver the ownership is what it should:

root@fs:~# ls -lh pickles/Library/Preferences/com.solidstatenetworks.awkhost.plist
-rw-rw---- 1 pickles pickles 109 2013-12-09 10:03 pickles/Library/Preferences/com.solidstatenetworks.awkhost.plist
root@fs:~#

Whenever that happens, the Portable Home Directory sync fails (or just hangs because it wants us to solve the ownership issue). Why? Not this is not often and happens at random. For instance, from the time the above happend back to the one before it was 2 weeks. But it has not happened ever since. I know i is easy to just change ownership in the imac's copy, but why is it being created as owned by root anyway?