sudoers trouble

[David Liontooth]

On kubuntu 5.04, my USB printer keeps turning itself off, and jobs often
get stuck in the queue. To delete the stuck jobs, I need to run the KDE
print manager in administrative mode. Hoary doesn't seem to have a good
way of doing this; pressing the Administrator button fails in various
ways, as others have documented. My solution is to set up an icon for
running "kcmshell printmgr" as user root.

The default sudoers file reads

root    ALL=(ALL) ALL
%admin  ALL=(ALL) ALL

and my regular user is of course a member of the admin group. However,
this isn't working reliably. The printmgr attempts to start (I see it in
"ps ax"), but something goes wrong and after maybe a minute (literally)
it finally dies. I take it this is a bug; occasionally I get the
expected behavior, where I'm prompted for a password and the program starts.

My workaround is to add this to sudoers,

liontooth   ALL= NOPASSWD: ALL

Nasty, right? Is there an elegant solution to this (other than updating
to Breezy)?

A somewhat less atrocious workaround would be to allow me to become root
in a shell and run printmgr from there. This is what I would do in
Debian, but Kubuntu won't let you -- the right xorg magic cookie is
missing.  How do I do this exactly?

Dave