I've been working on a patch that incrementally filters the permission page - patch at http://drupal.org/node/229193 and demo at http://dmitrizone.com/229193.mov .
Dmitri
Whether or not this thingy degrades, I don't really care. I wouldn't mind if it does not. But I care for whether this actually works on a full-blown Drupal site having 10-15 roles and countless modules exposing permissions (including CCK Field Permissions that adds 3 permissions per fields, f.e. for 125 fields). A previous attempt on parsing/filtering the permissions page on such a site resulted in a total browser freeze: #366442: Admin menu: Collapse modules on permissions page [1] It worked flawlessly on a stock Drupal core install. This needs to be tested before committing this. Thanks, Daniel [1] http://drupal.org/node/366442