well i encountered a problem that i described in this question: Problem with permissions after upgrading and while speaking with my friend about it he mentioned some kind of protocol that can take the permissions from root users he called it clinux but it think i misheard him because when i tried to google it, nothing came up.
SnapOverflow
SELinux, but that almost certainly has nothing to do with the problem you encountered. It's not enabled by default in Ubuntu, you would have to install it yourself.
The problem also had nothing to do with "root users" -- your regular user account by definition was not a "root user", and you said running programs as root (with sudo) worked fine.