OK, heres the deal, the first 2 times i installed linux redhat 7.1, i had no problems, but recently something changed, now it goes to the office or home profiles. which it never used to do. i tried reinstalling redhat but that did not work. I used to be able to give my user accoutn permissions to shutdown the computer and go into linuxconf. but now it gives me a broken pipe error, and i cannot shutdown or reboot the computer, i HAVE to be logged in as root and be in the "/" directory, what did i do wrong? did i install the wrong RPM or am i missing one?

usually its not the box that does "something wrong", its in the wetware :-]

could try to deduct from verifying your installed rpm's what went wrong: rpm --verify *
else youll have to list the linuxconf rpm contents, and manually verify configs, binaries, python etc is in place.
else post your system config, cuz 2x reinstalling Linux shouldnt be necessary, unless you severly abused the box or youve got exotic hardware??

*btw, IMO this post is not security related, better FUP to ../general or ../install?