System Preferences Panes greyed out unless run with sudo

Just installed Java 7 U51 on Mountain Lion 10.8.5
This pane is greyed out & not executable
If I try to run directly:
/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin/Contents/Home/lib/deploy/JavaControlPanel.pref Pane
I get an error (most idiotic in fact):
You can't open "Java" preferences pane because it is not available to you at this time
The "solution" is to open System Preferences as root with
  sudo /Applications/System\ Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/System\ Preferences
But surely that is not what one should need to do to configure preferences?
Seb

As it happened there were MCX policies in place & these System Preferences items were not checked (they were most likely added AFTER preferences were made
Ticking them, made it all behave normal

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