I'm using gparted version 0.14.0-1 which was just updated yesterday. If I recall correctly, prior to this update, the shortcut did nothing probably because I haven't set up consolekit or polkit. I'm currently just launching XFCE manually using "startxfce4" from the console.

Anyway, today I clicked on the shortcut and my desktop just froze up. I could still move my mouse but none of the windows were responding to my clicks or my keyboard. I then hit Ctrl + Alt + F1 to find that gparted was prompting me for my password. I typed it in and then switched back over to X. When I did, it was still completley frozen. I had to Ctrl+Alt+F1 again and Ctrl+C to kill the X server and then restart it.

I looked at the shortcut and it's launching the command "gparted-pkexec". When launched from a terminal emulator, it correctly asks for the root password and then successfully launches. However, when clicking the shortcut it crashes X. I propose possibly changing the shortcut to launch "gksudo gparted" or something safer that doesn't have the possibility of killing X. This would require and additional dependency on gksu so may not be the best option. I marked severity at high since this has the possibility of loosing a user's data in X applications that would have to be improperly killed.