I recently downloaded 5 ISOs and proceeded to burn them as images in K3b. After completing the first two successfully, I got through 98% of the third before K3b stopped the burn process and told me I didn't have root privileges. I rebooted the system and burned CD 3 and 4 before I got through about 60% of the fifth when it told me I had no root privileges.

I think this might be related to my USB problem, in which a USB device will just suddenly stop working. I have disabled subfs in /etc/kernel. Does anyone know what's going on?

If it makes any difference, I'm running SuSE 9.1 with Kernel 2.6.5 and KDE 3.3.1.

Be sure that you use the latest kernel update and k3b version. There have been some problems with root privileges for certain kernel versions. But it is strange that the problem appear while writing.