yo are not allowed access to the system configuration

[Bill Moss]

The message occurs when I use <system><administration><users and groups>
or any other system-tools-backends.
The error started for no apparent reason.

I edited '/etc/dbus-1/system.d/system-tools-backends.conf' to make sure
that all users were not blocked and even added an entry for my normal
user logon and one for the admin group and another for the adm group.

I made sure (/etc/group) that my logon was a member of the groups adm
and admin.

I made certain that /etc/sudoers contained %admin and %adm  ALL=(ALL)
ALL entries (sudo works fine, BTW).

I checked the menu that drives the operation and all entries are
proceeded by 'gksu'.

All needed files are owned by root with the suid bit set.

I even altered the system logon so I could log on Via GDM as root; still
will not work.
Running each command as root from the command line also generates access
errors from ALSA.

I reinstalled all applications that have the name dbus in them,
system-backends and all the system libraries.

This is a 'play' system that also has Fedora Core 7 and OpenSuSE 10.2 on
it (different drives, I use the BIOS to change the boot drive). It works
fine on the other OS's. I was hoping to dump my one and only Windows
machine for a simple version of Linux (I run SLED on my server) and
Ubuntu or Kbuntu are/were candidates. I'm perfectly comfortable at the
command line but cannot find command line utilities that use curses for
simple menus (what ever happened to linuxconf ??).

I wandered the Ubuntu forums and the only suggestions I could find were
the ones I tried.

-- 
William (Bill) Moss
billmoss at acm.org
NY (USA)
  Those who will not reason,
  are bigots,
  those who cannot,
  are fools,
  and those who dare not,
  are slaves.
by Lord Byron
  God grants liberty only to those who love it,
  and are always ready to guard and defend it.
by Daniel Webster
  Justice will not be served until those who are
  unaffected are as outraged as those who are.
by Benjamin Franklin