Windows USB access problems
 

My problem is an issue with Hotsyncing a new Palm. When I am logged in as administrator, the option "Local USB" appears in the Hotsync menu and I can succesfully sync. The problem is that when logged in as my normal user "Joe", that option does not appear and thus I can't Hotsync.

I run as a restricted user on my laptop, as in my user only belongs to the "Users" group and none other. This way I can't accidentally break the laptop during normal use. In the past few weeks I have been unable to access USB flash drives inserted into the system as my normal user though it is accesible as administrator. This problem simply appeared a few weeks ago, probably associated with a Windows patch.

I suspect the problem is my user cannot access the USB ports and thus the Hotsync Manager can't access the USB port the Palm is plugged into. Are there any settings in Group Policy that would allow me to fix this? I would assume a permissions problem but I don't know where to look besides the Group Policy "user access" settings and the driver inf's permissions. Also, it would appear that the "Users" group doesn't even exist anymore since when I try to give it permissions, the error dialog pops up. Any ideas?

Your Users group does not have access to hardware that was not installed when the user was created.

The quick way to fix this is to temporarily promote your user to administrator status and as your user uninstall and reinstall the software, or possibly make sure that you selected the option for "Install for all users" when you ran it as the admin.

Much more simple that playing with the group settings, you just have to make sure to demote "Joe" again after the installation.

Just in case this doesn't apply, what version of Windows are you running?

you could also use the runas command to install the program (it lets you run a command as a difrent user, install.exe as administrator for example), but i think liquidlight is dead on with the raising the user to local admin.

The runas command didn't work for the setup, that's how I normally install software. But liquidlight's procedure worked! Thank you very much for the help.

Another satisfied customer :) now if I could just figure out how to freaking get paid for this!