A followup to this post : The PortalRight enumeration defined in Microsoft.Sharepoint.Portal.Security is, for some reason, derived from UInt32 rather than Int32. You can see this in the Object Browser when in a VB.NET project. This anomaly - nothing more...
For some reason, Sharepoint's object model doesnt adher to Microsoft's recommended practices - namely, trying to keep your external interfaces CLS-compliant. It seems the object model itself exposes several methods and properties that use the UInt32 data...