I had a minor hiccup with my Lenovo Thinkpad X300 where the power manager went nuts and I wasn’t able to switch it to a lower power mode when on battery… after some googling, this blog post (and the comments) helped fix my problem:
I am working with a Lenovo Thinkpad T60 and ran into an unexpected problem. The Power Manager refused to start with the error You are not authorized to display the panel for selecting a power scheme though I am using a windows account with administrative rights