Thank you, repentence.
Part of my interest in this is forward-looking.
It already occurred to me that if I would like accounts to be considered as being held in trust I should make sure my heirs and assigns, or whoever steps in to run things if I get run over by a bus, knows exactly which accounts are considered held in trust and which are considered to be part of the operation's own operating capital/assets...
-MarkM-
All services should segregate their own money from user's money. They don't need trust accounts to do this, but they do need sufficient reserves of their own to cover expected daily/weekly transactions and other operating costs. And yes, it would be helpful if users knew what the policies regarding deceased accounts are for each service they deal with. For those services which require a significant amount of verification, it should be easy for the executor of a deceased estate to establish the legitimacy of a claim to the account (or for users to make specific bequests of accounts in their will). It's likely going to be a much more problematic issue with services which don't require any significant user verification, though.
Failure to segregate user funds when you accept money on deposit from people is a big deal. It brought down one of the online poker providers that the US DoJ went after - it's not an issue which is only relevant to Bitcoin services.
A "secured" creditor is someone who has a secured claim - usually against a specific asset. A personal loan from your bank is generally unsecured but a motor vehicle or home loan is generally secured - the lender can take control of the asset and sell it if you default and if you owe 7,000 other people money as well, that asset is not available to satisfy their claims until the secured creditor's claim has been satisfied first. Sometimes security takes the form of a lien over something other than physical property.
Receivers deal only with the interests of secured creditors so the fact that Bitcoinica is going through as receiver before it goes into liquidation means there's at least one secured creditor. We're presuming it's Wendon because Tihan said that funds they obtain via receivership will be made available to the liquidator for distribution to unsecured creditors. We don't know what the secured asset is (the domain and IP are the first things which spring to mind), but there'd be little point in pursuing receivership if it had no value.