no sweat. sorry we couldn t get this one resolved. for the sake of closure, i would like to discuss just a little further.
i can t imagine why the machine would freeze while booting single user. in theory, if it booted single user properly, you would have unrestricted root access, and could change the permissions. do you recall what the error message was when it froze?
i have no idea what went wrong with the carbon copy clone, but i would find it hard to believe that the only thing affected is the permissions of sudo. so i would expect there to be some subtle system wide discrepency in the permissions. for this reason, i think that even if you had managed to change the permissions of sudo in single user mode, you still would have had unforeseen problems cropping up from time to time. so all things considered, perhaps wiping the drive and reinstalling was the wisest course of action.
like i said, i have not used this program, but i m going to take a wild stab in the dark based on your description for the point where the problem might have arisen. you said the system worked ffine after you cloned it, and only broke after you erased the original. so perhaps the cloning program relied on links to the original partition, and some invisible files remained there in use. like perhaps your new partition was relying on user informations from the netinfo dB still on the original partition, and when you erased it, UIDs got mixed up and permissions went haywire. just a stab in the dark.
i have seen threads on the boards discussing the permissions issues that can arise when doing system backups, so maybe one of those experts will come in here and have something more intelligent to say than i.
even though i think it was the best decision for you to reformat, i think we should still try to understand what went wrong, so that we can avoid it in the future. however i m out of ideas.