dist-upgrade results in menu system tools not running anymore

[Alan E. Davis]

I have upgraded (dist-upgrade) after a fresh install of breezy on my
friend's system.  After this, apparently somehow, the ability to run
the gnome system tools in the menu has been lost.  I can run them from
the console as root, but the ability of gnome to authenticate for the
administrator to use these tools has been lost.  So, for example,
after clicking on "networking" the bottom bar of the screen shows
"starting net...", but goes off in a minute or less, apparently after
being unable to authenticate as the superuser.

Is there anyone on line who can tell me what to do to enable this
ability again?

Alan Davis