KDE Adept updater, Synaptic apt-get, Xserver issue

["John W. Foster" <johnwfoster@verizon.net>]

I have seen this for years but until now I just left it alone. I now need to 
be able to allow someone else to do some of the system updating & they are 
not as experienced as I so they are less likely to perceive this as simply a 
quirk. When I do an update or any other function from the xserver screen in 
KDE with any Debian system update app I get this message from the app:


dpkg-preconfigure: cannot connect to X server :0.0
debconf: unable to initialize frontend: Kde
debconf: (DISPLAY problem?)
debconf: falling back to frontend: Dialog
Preconfiguring packages ...
(Reading database ... 398019 files and directories currently installed.)

It is a source of irritation to me. I tried switching the Xwrapper.config 
to "allowed_users=anybody" (against my better judgement) but that did not fix 
the problem. I do not run these as root but instead use the root password 
from the xserver screen when asked for it.
Any other suggestions?
-- 
John W. Foster