I am trying to install Adobe eReader. I get the message "Unable to elevate to administrative rights error 1". I just had to re-install Ubuntu, what did I do to change things as I never had this problem in the past

Well, you sure as hell need to find out what's going on.

The only useful-looking reference that I could quickly Google is http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManage...&bShowAll=true, which refers to the installer, which indeed might require enhanced privileges ... in a "real" Windows environment. This implies that, in the Wine environments, a directory is thought not to be writable by the Windows process. Perhaps Wine is emulating that, too.

Where are your various directories located? Google to see if Wine implements emulation of restricted user-levels, without relying on the Linux filesystem restrictions. (By now, it ought to ...)