"Remove dead screens" message when session exists

Hi,

About every other time I try to attach an existing session on a
certain host I'm getting a message, something like "Remove dead
screens with -wipe", and then it starts a new screen session instead
of attaching the one I requested. Is there a way to fix this? I
thought the connections were done over unix domain sockets, which
means that it should be easy to tell a live screen from a dead one -
if you don't get a "connection refused" then it's live. I don't know
what screen is doing instead of this, but whatever it is it is very
error-prone. And especially annoying - if instead of terminating the
new session it opens, I detach it, then after that I can no longer
attach either session by name since they both have the same name...

Thanks,

Frederik

-- 
http://ofb.net/~frederik/