Seemingly random "Authentication is required to change your own user data"
Solution 1:
Have you tried to rewrite the permissions to your home directory? open terminal:
cd /home/
chown -R your-account-name your-account-name
Solution 2:
This looks very much like a confirmed bug: Annoying dialog "Authentication is required to change your own user data"
As of now there exist workarounds (partly mentioned in other answers to this question) but neither the exact cause nor a real solution is known.
Instead of changing a system policy in a way where I don't know potential side effects I opted to live with the dialogue for now. Of course I don't want to authorize an unknown action, so the quickest way to deal with it is
- select the dialogue (so that is has the focus)
- press ESC until the last of the dialogues is closed.
Solution 3:
This worked for me:
1) At Settings -> Session and Startup ( Application Autostart TAB )
Uncheck PolicyKit Authentication Agent
( /usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 )
2) In a Terminal:
sudo killall polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1
My Desktop was running:
- Distributor ID: Ubuntu
- Description: Ubuntu Wily Werewolf (development branch)
- Release: 15.10
- Codename: wily