elevated access from xrdp

[Boggess Rod]

A while back, I mentioned that the IT guys swapped out my dead drive
with a dying drive, which died, and so was swapped out with a new dying
drive, with a controller so buggy that it's blacklisted in the Linux
kernel. (No respect, I tell ya.) I have some spare time at work, so I
decided I'd get around this problem by installing Ubuntu on my
development box, which I only access via terminal services.

XRDP, btw, doesn't work correctly in 10.04, so I upgraded to 10.10. It
appears to work fine. My first clue that something was amiss was when I
ran Synaptic Package Manager and it reports that it is unable to copy
the user's Xauthorization file. I assumed that was because I was using
xrdp and it either has a safety issue or because the file is in use by
the server.

After trudging back and forth a bit, everything's installed, and my
experiments are done, but I remain curious. I can't mount the windows
partition, I can't run the Disk Utility (flashes and disappears), and I
can't run Synaptic Package Manager. Anyone got any ideas what's blocking
these functions when I access via terminal services?