Would somebody who does not use a sudo based distro please test whether this happens on your system? 1. Start kate as normal user. 2. Start a separate kate session as root using 'tdesu kate'. Two separate sessions should be open. In the second session you should be able to view the contents of /root. If only one session is open then you are experiencing the same problem. No other app seems affected by this behavior. Thanks much. Darrell