Forgive the newbie question. I've been trying to install FreeBSD 5.4 on a new AMD64 based box at work today, and I started running into problems. Maybe some background is appropriate? Here goes...

I've finished the first stage of development of a model in C++ which simulates airflow through a fairly complicated medium. It's been a royal pain in the arse, but I got there, and I've been rewarded with a shiny new computer to run the model on. It's a fairly demanding model - typically taking 8 hours to run on a P4 with 0.5 GB RAM and default level 3 optimisation under gcc. Anyway, I digress...

I've been using Linux for a few years, but recently my main work box has been hacked. I left it unpatched for too long, and left an account open for a colleague with questionable taste in passwords. Plus I now work at UC Berkeley, so I'll admit there's a certain amount of willy waving going on in the office about BSD...

Googling the first install problem taught me to amend the ttyv8 line in /etc/ttys to get KDE (3.4?) running on boot. Of course, the next problem was that I hadn't added my user account to the wheel group. So, one re-install and some text editing later, I found that kdesu isn't working. It's rejecting bad passwords, but it isn't letting me view KDE administration applications.with the correct root password. Oh, su works fine now except for launching KDE apps...

I'm going to post again in this thread with the error message I get from $kdesu kcontrol &as soon as I get into work tomorrow, but I was hoping there might be a potted response someone much wiser than me could come up with. More Googling tells me that kdesu was actually broken in some earlier FreeBSD releases. In the meantime, do I need to go with Gnome? Is there a likely fix in a config file / group membership / file permission that I haven't thought of?

Sorry to be vague - if there's not enough info here, please hang fire for 12 hours and I'll post error messages for your entertainment. If something springs to mind, please let me know. And thanks in advance.