Xfce4 Power Manager - Brightness + Options not available

[Robin]

First things first, props to the dev for fixing a bug I found only a
few hours after reporting it.

The brightness panel control does not work on my Toshiba Satellite
A205-S4607 running 2.6.26-6 on Debian 5.0.  I tried running lshal as
suggested in the docs and I get the following from "lshal | grep
laptop_panel" :
 info.capabilities = {'laptop_panel'} (string list)
  info.category = 'laptop_panel'  (string)
  laptop_panel.access_method = 'general'  (string)
  laptop_panel.num_levels = 8  (0x8)  (int)
  info.capabilities = {'laptop_panel'} (string list)
  info.category = 'laptop_panel'  (string)
  laptop_panel.access_method = 'general'  (string)
  laptop_panel.num_levels = 8  (0x8)  (int)

Issue #2 when I open settings the following options are grayed out and unusable:
General Menu:  When power is pressed
On AC Menu:  When laptop lid is closed
On Battery Menu:  When laptop lid is closed + When battery performance
is critical

I thought I was lacking permissions, but when I tried running
xfce4-power-manager or xfce4-power-manager-settings using su I get an
error message:

xfce4-power-manager-settings-ERROR **: Did not receive a reply.
Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply,
the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout
expired, or the network connection was broken.
aborting...
Aborted

I am not sure if I should be posting this to the dev list, please let me know.

Thanks!