Local users in VSFTPD can't have a a false shell (was, VSFTPD problems with all logins anonymous or PAM)

[Gabriel M Dragffy]

After spending the whole day tweaking and experimenting with vsftpd I
now have it setup as follows. Anonymous login, read only, with upload
enabled in one directory. I have a list of local users that can login
over SSL, and have read/write access to files in their jails. The
problem is that some of these users I want to be ftp-specific so they
don't need valid shells. However if any of the users has the
shell /bin/false in the passwd file then when they try to login to the
ftp is says LOGIN INVALID. Please, how can I go about allowing users to
loging but without giving them valid shells?

A lot of experimenting revelaed vsftpd would only let users login that
had a home directory of /home/$user and a shell, either /bin/bash
or /bin/sh specified in /etc/passwd. I'm stumped. 

Cheers
Gabe