Yeah - I've tried that in the past:

  mbf041:~ shephard$ ls -lart ~/.hushlogin
  -rw-r--r--  1 shephard  staff  0 Apr 23 21:36  /Users/shephard/.hushlogin
  mbf041:~ shephard$ 

But it still didn't help. I ended up having to sudo rm -rf /private/var/log/asl/*.asl to fix it on my system.