By playing with and learning about various window managers, I managed to booger up my default menu. When I run any app requiring root (like synaptic) I get this error message instead of the terminal:

"Failed to run synaptic"

"The underlying authorization mechanism (sudo) does not allow you to run this program. Contact the system administrator."

This isn't a huge problem, since I can simply open a terminal myself and sux my way into synaptic. But I'd like to get the menu back the way it was. Right now here's the current syntax for synaptic:

"[exec] (Synaptic) {su-to-root -X -c synaptic}"

Thanks for any help on this.

Edit: Aw nuts. It looks like I may have messed up my locale settings. I recall now doing some"purging." And there have been some posts on a bug in the various en_US options.

Anyone know whether I'm on the right track on this??

Forget what I said above about locale settings.

I dug around online and located the syntax for the synaptic entry in the original fluxbox menu file. It looks like this:

[exec] (Synaptic) {aterm -tr +sb -fg white -T"Synaptic" -e su -c synaptic}

Cf. with the one I quote above:

[exec] (Synaptic) {su-to-root -X -c synaptic}

The restored original opens synaptic (and other root-terminal-based apps) perfectly.

So the problem is fixed, but I have no idea how all the menu entries got rewritten. I was fiddling with lots of menu configuration in different window managers, and I read somewhere that a core Debian menu can"repopulate" somehow with all recently installed apps. How I managed to do this, I have no clue. ????