The Synaptics Package Manager has disappeared from the Administration menu.

No clue how that happened.

Software Manager shows that it is installed. There is no option to check or uncheck the "Show" option, because the Synaptics Package Manager does not show up there, or in any of the other menu catagories.

I'm still a rookie and have tried editing the menu options.
The only thing I can figure out, is that this was caused by an update.

Similar to the loss of the middle mouse function that used to paste highlighted text. I don't know what to do about that either, as subsequent updates have not restored the middle mouse function.

Is this operator error?

I am not running Mint here, but I think it might be similar to steps 4 and 5 in this tutorial: http://tutorialforlinux.com/2012/06/...teapplauncher/

In other words, if Synaptic doesn't appear where you can simply click the "Show" box, then click the "New Item" button.

For the command field in the "Create Launcher" window, I think gksu synaptic should work.

Man, step 4 worked like a charm, the first time.

Thank you, m.a.l.'s pa! You made it look easy.
ツ
On a side note, I woke up at the Flying J, just West of Albuquerque, one time. I was amazed to see the sky full of hot air balloons. I learned that this was an annual event.

Yay, glad it worked! Yeah, the Balloon Fiesta is awesome -- went pretty well this year, the weather cooperated for the most part.

I may have spoken too soon. I opened it a couple of times, but then it hung up when I selected a package for installation.

I forced it to quit, now it will not open, again.
It asks for my password, but nothing seems to happen.

I restarted Cinnamon, to no affect.

An error message has started popping up:
Text empty or something similar. It popped up and faded away fairly quick.

Process Monitor was showing that gksu synaptic was active, but nothing was happening, so I killed it.

Now, synaptic is active but using no cpu time.
I killed this one, which was owned by root, and then synaptic started normally.

Could this be a Cinnamon issue vs a Gnome issue, that requires a command different from gksu synaptic?

Here are a few of the installed files:
Note: I can not use any of the tools in this editing box. No access to fonts, Bold, Italics, Links, Image... no access to anything there.

/usr/bin/synaptic-pkexec
/usr/sbin
/usr/sbin/synaptic

/usr/share
/usr/share/applications
/usr/share/applications/synaptic-kde.desktop
/usr/share/applications/synaptic.desktop
/usr/share/apport
/usr/share/apport/package-hooks

Could be, but I don't know; perhaps someone who uses Mint will step in here. Have you tried rebooting? What happens if you run gksu synaptic from the command line? And what about synaptic-pkexec -- that's the command my Synaptic launcher in Debian Wheezy uses. Running either of those commands in a terminal, you may be able to figure out what's wrong by looking at the output.

Doesn't seem like it.

Not much time.
Earlier terminal attempts returned 'command not found'.
Not necessarily for 'synaptic-pkexec'

That seems to have done the trick, but no time to play with it.
If no problems, its fixed. Otherwise, I'll be back..

Thank you, very much, m.a.l.'s pa.
ツ