I'm very cool with bypassing root-level security checks when originating from the physical machine. Anyway, another thing you can do is put some scripts in your path that override the application that you want to run and then just sudo run it. I'm not really sure what PATH KDM (and therefore KDE?) uses, but probably has to do something with either your user's .profile or root's .profile or bash_profile or something. Course, isn't there a way to just elevate your user to be a root-like account if you're going to be doing this anyway? Put your user in the root group or something. -AT