Muser that the launching program/environment is set as.
Personally, I have a trick to make sure that I can identify anything I run that has been spawned as root rather than as me - the Xresources, KDE interface, and Gnome settings for root are all set to have garishly obvious colours, so that I know that mistakes with those programs could be toxic.
Somewhat outside the thread but this sounds like a good idea....could you describe this 'trick' please?