Settings don't take unless sudo'd

This quit working properly very recently. When i fire up gnome-cups-manager, it doesn't prompt for a password. it lets me change printer settings without erroring, but they don't stick (exit and come back in and all changes are gone). If i run the app with sudo, everything works like it's supposed to. I discovered this behavior building a laptop last weekend from a daily build CD (30 April 2006 - i386). I then tested it on a machine that's been up and running for 3-4 weeks (gets updates daily) and noticed that it's behaving the same way. FYI, this is all with a local user account that's a member of all of the "normal" security groups (lpadmin, plugdev, cdrom, etc) as well as a member of admin. Basically, i can install a printer but i can't configure it without sudoing.