Lost Admin ability

[David B. Toth]

I upgraded my dual-boot HP laptop to 8.04 and seem to have lost the 
ability to do some admin things, like Synaptic, Update mgr, and other 
things related to packages ...
It never asks me for my admin password, the system seems to ruminate 
for a while, and then it goes on like I didn't click anything ...

sudo still workls as in    sudo gedit filename     but that's about 
it ....  this was an upgrade from 7.10 .... and this is with the 
newer kernel (old kernel and recovery kernel act the same).


Thoughts?

Thanks,
Dave