Repeated 'mac OS X wants to make changes' prompt

In the last few days, I have started seeing a really annoying problem.

Some apps (e.g. Shrook) have now started displaying the prompt

Mac OS X wants to make changes. Type an administrator's name and password to allow this.

Mac OS X wants to use the "System" keychain.

Username:

Password:

Now, I am used to seeing this occasionally when I run some app that indeed needs to do something requiring admin privileges. But in the case of Shrook, this will happen 10-15 times in quick succession. It also happens on other apps - and the common factor seems to be the use of embedded browser capabilities (I guess web kit plugin or something like that). For example, another app that shows this behaviour is F5 BIG-IP Edge Client - again, I might be prompted 10-15 times during login, and it has an embedded web page in the UI.

This behaviour seems to have just happened (well, in the past couple of days or so)

Interesting things about it:

• The username field in the prompt is empty - whereas previously, when this prompt occurred (rarely) it contained my (long) User name
• It seems to happen when the app is trying some sort of network/web access - probably in connection with HTTPS and hence keychain access
• I see the same behaviour in Safari when I end up using a client certificate (using HTTPS) to connect to a remote web server (when I might get the prompt 2 times or so).

NB: The multiple prompts are NOT caused by me entering an incorrect user/password - that is easy to distinguish because the prompt will 'shiver' if I do enter an invalid combination, and will leave the username/password in the fields ready for me to correct them

It seems to me that the app doesn't seem to know who it is running as - hence the empty username field.

- chris