The administrator password is only recognized at login

After installing Leopard I have an awkward problem with the administrator password. Luckily the password is recognized by the "login" process so I can log in and use my computer for work, but it is not accepted at almost all other occasions when the system for whatever reasons prompts for the administrator password, like with Software Update and System Preferences.
The error message is different when I deliberately type a wrong password, which shows that the system does recognize the administrator password but refuses to accept it.
My guess is that something is wrong with the Keychain Access. In fact there is an update for that application but I cannot install it.
Has anyone have this kind of problems? Has it been solved and how?

Thanks Paul for your suggestion which made me look away from the Keychain Access, more towards the UNIX file permissions and here is what I've found and done.
The GUI Get Info gives the following for my home directory:
vjeran (Me) : RW
staff : RW
everyone : R
That seemed OK to me.
In the Terminal.app, after issuing the command "id" I got:
uid=1030(vjeran)
gid=4051(magnet)
groups=4051(magnet),81(appserveradm),79(appserverusr),120(abe),80(admin)
(already before Tiger, I've set up these numbers and groups with NetInfo in order to match those on my UNIX account of the company's Alpha cluster)
Instead, after issuing the command "dscl . -read /Users/vjeran" I got:
UniqueID : 1030
PrimaryGroupID : 4051 120 20
The id command did not see me as a member of the staff group and dscl command did not see me in the admin group.
So, I did the following:
dscl . -append /Groups/staff GroupMemebership vjeran
dscl . -append /Users/vjeran PrimaryGroupID 80
I was hopeful that this will solve my problem , but even after the reboot I still have no way to successfully authenticate as the administrator.

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This method only works when you have
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The administrator password is only recognized at login

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