This started happening to me immediately after I installed gparted - installed daily CD 9/26/09. After that package, applications that required admin privileges came up with additional options to remember the password, etc, but wouldn't accept my password - can't even launch the terminal from the menu, but I can launch things as root by Alt-F2 gksu and then launching whatever I need like gnome-terminal...etc. I made sure that my user name was still part of the admin group, but I wouldn't know where to begin beyond just a few basics...  I'm getting all sorts of errors when just trying to run gnome-system-log:

root@lappy1537:/home/jeff# gnome-system-log
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
**
gnome-system-log:ERROR:logview-prefs.c:540:logview_prefs_store_fontsize: assertion failed: (fontsize > 0)
Aborted (core dumped)


And when I run gksu from this terminal, and try to run 'synaptic' as user 'jeff'


root@lappy1537:/home/jeff# gksu
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)

(gksu:21673): GConf-CRITICAL **: gconf_value_free: assertion `value != NULL' failed
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
/usr/bin/xauth:  error in locking authority file /tmp/libgksu-K2lcLY/.Xauthority
/usr/bin/xauth:  error in locking authority file /tmp/libgksu-K2lcLY/.Xauthority
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
No protocol specified

(synaptic:21700): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0.0


Hopefully this is useful to somebody... because I don't know what's going on.