Agreed on ubuntu's root management...I'm actually not a linux newbie and moved to Ubuntu for other reasons. Getting over the "no su" thing has taken some getting used to, but sudo -i seems to work the same way, so I've been reasonably appeased...until now.

My hunch is that this can't be a permissions thing since I'm effectively root, but I don't know what flasher-3.0 is trying to access on my system, and there aren't any error messages whatsoever to give any clues.