In the beginning I was trying to run a WiFi scanning program that needs to be root in order to display full data, that's how I got into the sudoers problem. I had in fact set up ssh access (using a key pair) from user to root account and it worked, but thought it would be using CPU time to encrypt the data between root and user so I tried the sudoers method. I have now received my N800 back from warranty repair and will have some time to work with it again within the next week.

So you took the 2008 OS factory sudoers and added
user ALL = (ALL) ALL
at the top? I just want to make sure I do it exactly as you did. If I have
user ALL = (ALL) ALL
at top of my sudoers, is there any reason to leave the remaining lines in the sudoers?