Don't know where along the line it happened, but something I did whilst chopping out cruft, caused an issue, synaptic now opens with a click without asking for the root password, and so does Gparted as it now apparently uses pkexec too.
Never understood why they use pkexec instead of gksu, but I never broke it before so I didn't mess with it.
I can make another menu entry easy enough and use "gksu synaptic" and it works fine, but going forward with rolling these little test iso's i'm concerned that if an update to synaptic gets pushed from upstream, that it will wipe out any new .desktop and menu entry I make and revert to pkexec.
I read the man page and other docs about it last night, and they gave a whole lotta complex reasons for using it, a lot of them repeatedly mentioned "security", but doesn't seem all that secure to me if can get broken that easy and the default behavior when that happens is to allow a user to open synaptic or gparted as root without having to have a password.
Any ideas or enlightenment would be greatly appreciated, I have one more run to do on my 32 bit and it's done (hopefully, if I don't break anything else) and I started on a 64 bit version yesterday too, but can't go any further until I figure this out.
I'm off to search for answers, but thought i'd post here first as y'all have a lot of experience with Devuan already that I don't.
Thanks!
~greenjeans