Från min lilla urklipssbok:
Launching Cocoa applications with root privileges
To run applications as root, we use sudo. However combining open and sudo in this form:
sudo open /path/to/some.app
results in sudo running open as root, but open still opens the application as the original user!!!
Therefore, the longer method of specifying the full path name for Cocoa applications (not just to the .app package, but to the actual executable):
sudo "/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit"