Good call. I don't know what I was thinking.

So, next piece in the puzzle. Running k3b as user brings it up just fine... don't have my burner with me, though, so I couldn't test CD burning or ripping. (BTW, is ripping to MP3 possible with the way K3B was packaged.)

However, there appear to be something wrong in the shortcut menu --- which I've never seen until now. It currently reads "/usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/su - -c /usr/local/kde/bin/k3b". Executing this command as root or running from the menu does nothing, but running "/usr/local/kde/bin/k3b" as root does the trick to bring up k3b!

Penguinbait, not sure if this is only affecting me because of the .deb conflict mentioned earlier, but I thought I'd share.