vsmagent used to check that the home directory was present, but this doesn't work where root isn't allowed to read/search ~/.. (SELinux, NFS root_squash, etc). We need to do this as the user, so tl-xinit is the first place we can reliably check this. What tl-xinit should do if there's no home directory is something to consider as well.
Remember to consider cases with Kerberos (e.g. NFS, AFS) where we might not be able to access the home dir before kinit.
We don't see why we need to check this, so closing this.
