Getting "Lock wait timeout exceeded;" when using "for update"

[Nic Whale]

I am have been getting lock wait time out errors for a while in a range of situations. While I think some of them can be explained by Bug 16979 ( http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=16979) some of them I am not sure.

In some cases the database is getting essentially no use, but I am still getting locks.

Server version: 5.051b-community-NT

So while I am getting lock wait time outs in a variety of situations, I will concentrate on this one for starters.
1. Just recently I have been forced to use "for update" (ie "SELECT lastupdated from documents where id =32422 for update "). Note: id is the primary key.
2. I am getting the error "Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction SQLState: 41000 VendorError: 1205"
3. This is NOT within a transaction so Autocommit=ON.
4. Similar behaviour is happening on the production box, so similar version but on Linux.
5. Using Java connector

As i said, the database is not having that much traffic on it, so I assume I must be doing something wrong in the code because it could not be the system....

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

The Whale