I have a Content Profile called "Partner Profile" that is created for users of the role "partner".

I have another role called "partner manager", and that role is used manage "partner" accounts and manager their profiles.

Because my "partner managers" have the permission to create new Partner Profile nodes, they can create them without them being tied into specific "partner" accounts.

This sort of brings up the bigger question - why would someone ever want to simply create a Content Profile through /node/add/[content_profile] instead of going through /user/[uid]/edit/[content_profile]?

When I have time, I'll look into this further, but I was hoping to have a discussion on it. The nodecomment module handles a similar sort of scenario. It prevents anyone from creating "nodecomment" node, unless the node to attach it to (as a comment) is passed in as an argument. This prevents "rogue" nodecomments from existing where they are not associated with any parent. I think the same logic may be able to be applied.