[Edit]  Since writing this, I've realized that the true reason behind this was that my account was not a member of the System Administrators Role in SSRS.  Once I adressed that (see this post for details), I no longer had to run SSMS as an administrator to modify roles.  This is probably not a bug.  I'm fairly sure that I added myself (The account I was using) during SSRS installation, but since it was a while ago now, I can't swear to that.  This was the other reason I was holding off on submitting it as a bug... to see if I either figured it out or someone else told me why I was wrong.

Was attempting to write a blog post for T-SQL Tuesday this evening and was making good progress until I hit a 2 hour roadblock.  As far as I can tell, this is a combined issue between Windows 7, SSMS, SQL Server 2008 and reporting Services.  Basically, unless you choose 'Run as Administrator' for SSMS, you cannot: Add new roles, edit existing roles, etc. in Reporting services inside of SSMS, regardless of the permissions of the user you connect as.  Highly frustrating and very hard to find a solution for online.

I could not deploy reports.  I could not add or edit roles.  I could not do anything to fix the problem until I ran the tool as an administrator.  Why that has anything to do with permissions inside of Reporting services I don't know, but it definitively does.  I found it extremely hard to believe that this was a legitimate reason and went back and forth between administrator / normal 3 times and it changed my ability to modify things each time.  The account I’m logged into is a local windows admin, this is a laptop and not a member of a domain.  This account is also a sysadmin of the sql server instance and the account used to run the reporting services service, etc.  None of that matters.

Running SSMS Regularly:

Running as Administrator:

System/DB/App Specs:

Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio           10.0.2531.0
Microsoft Analysis Services Client Tools              10.0.1600.22
Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC)       6.1.7600.16385
Microsoft MSXML                                              3.0 5.0 6.0
Microsoft Internet Explorer                                  8.0.7600.16385
Microsoft .NET Framework                                 2.0.50727.4927
Operating System                                             6.1.7600  (Windows 7 64 bit)

SQL Version: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (SP1) - 10.0.2531.0 (X64)   Mar 29 2009 10:11:52   Copyright (c) 1988-2008 Microsoft Corporation  Developer Edition (64-bit) on Windows NT 6.1 <X64> (Build 7600: )

Plan to open a connect ticket as soon as I figure out how (Never done it before, and I'm not finding it very intuitive to submit a bug) and ensure there isn't one open already.  As a side note, running SSMS as an administrator seems to break SSMS Tools and doesn't allow rocketdock to overlay it, so I guess I can choose between running an addon or making changes to my SSRS installation =).

OK, rant off.  That's all for this post, but I want to post a few of the things I tried to search for at the bottom of this post to see if I can possibly save someone else some time with this one.  Ignore the rest of this.

Reporting Services Insufficient Permissions
Error rsAccessDenied : The permissions granted to user  are insufficient for performing this operation.
Reporting Services New Role Greyed Out SSMS Windows 7