I fixed it.
Maybe this should go into some kind of GNU/Linux troubleshooter!
The problem solution needs some background:
I keep my development files in a separate partition so I can backup and
restore it with different distributions. Because of this I set my
regular user id to 500, the default for a Fedora install but not Debian
where it's 1000.
When installing Debian I create a temporary user "x" (with id 1000) so I
can log in and then create my regular user "y" (with id 500).
By default new users get their own group with the same name.
The problem was that I didn't add user "y" to the same system groups as
user "x"!
These groups (for Debian) are
dialout,cdrom,floppy,audio,video,plugdev,netdev,powerdev.
This can be repaired with
# usermod -G $(groups x | sed -e 's|x ||g' -e 's| |,|g') -a y
to add user "y" to the groups x belongs to, but not group "x".
Then you can delete user and group "x".
Too bad the error messages were so cryptic.
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