OK, in the interest of space, I moved a bunch of partitions around my HDs... to make a long story short, I had to break my install but I got it back with a bit of hassle and reinstalling a few packages.

Now I have a small problem: when I try to run MCC as regular user, it no longer asks me for the root password, but brings up a window titled "Error" that simply says "Insufficient rights." My typical response is something like, "I know; just ask me for the password... I'll show you rights!"

What is your hopefully-more-friendly-and-helpful response?

It sounds like you might have broken the package that prompts for the root password, I can't remember its name. Just to check it's nothing silly could you post the permissions of mcc (obtain them with a ls -l on the directory that contains mcc).

Seems ok to me...
What's the name of the program that prompts for the root password? Or what's the name of the pkg (to anyone else who's reading)?

i don't know which program mandrake uses, but i know that you can use 'gnomesu' to similar effect.