I have found some info that, in my case, says the issue is my rom. I've enjoyed srf 1.2 (sprint epic) for months now, but this is the 1st sign that makes me want to look into a fresh rom install of something more updated.
read here:
"2) Binary updater fails to update binary – This usually happens because for Superuser can’t write to the system partition where the binary is installed. This can happen for a couple reasons. First, and most common, is that your device has S-ON which prevents the system partition from being written to at runtime. Even if a remount succeeds, and the system thinks that the partition is mounted as rw, you can’t write to it. There are different solutions for different devices, but the easiest usually involves simply updating Superuser through ROM Manager. If you were able to flash a custom ROM, you’ll be able to update Superuser through ROM Manager. The other reason that updating the binary fails is that your ROM Dev did something silly like putting the su binary in /sbin. I have not found a reason why this would be done, but I’ve seen it many times. The problem with putting su in /sbin is that even though you may be able to modify it at runtime, the changes will not stick over a reboot. This is because /sbin is part of boot.img, which gets unpacked and loaded at boot. The other problem with having the su binary there is that it’s almost always the first entry in the PATH. If you’re unfamiliar with the PATH, it’s a list of places that the system will look for a program, once it finds one it stops looking. Superuser will not try to update su if it’s found to be in /sbin because the change will not persist. The fix for this is not quite so easy as before and you’ll likely have to change ROM, and let the developer of whatever you were using know that they’re doing it wrong."
from:
Initial impressions of 3.0 written by the author of superuser (claims
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