Comment 83 for bug 15001

It sounds VERY strange, but I'm experiencing this EXACT problem on Kubuntu Gutsy 7.04. The system is completely updated and ship-shape.
Only one thing happened before this and I'm not sure if it related --
I had changed my locale to en_US from en_IN using Kcontrol - Regional & Accesibility - Country/Region - Select System Language and changed it to English (United States).
Right now I just noticed that cat /etc/timezone showed "User Defined" instead of "Asia/Calcutta". I dpkg-reconfigure'ed tzdata and now timezone is Asia/Calcutta. I don't know if these two things are related, but I definitely cannot use kcontrol and systemsettings modules in Administrator Mode. No error displayed, just drops me back to main page without admin privs.