Tim McLaughlin writes:

my problem is that I need to be able to construct a zclass built by a user who no longer exists. My suspicion is that "nobody" does not have those privileges, and so it seems that I may be SOL :-( My memory says:

everything under "control_panel" (this includes ZClasses) in unowned. There is excellent documentation about Zope 2.2 security. There, you should be able to check how reliable my memory is. Dieter