Greg stopped and restarted the FrancoToile and Lansdowne eXist db's and that seemed to correct the problem when we tested.

Melanie reported that she couldn't upload to the London Map eXist database, which meant all three instances (FrancoToile, Lansdowne) were affected by the mysterious ghost lock file being created when the NFS system went down a few days ago. Greg investigated that further and solved the problem similarly after conversing with the sys-admins. I expect he'll post with more technical details.