Fun Windows 2000 featurette!
If you want a user who doesn't have superuser privileges to be able to use the palmpilot hotsync, you can't just have root install the palm software and then have the user use it. No, if you want the user to be able to run the hotsync (or even to have the palm desktop work), you need to give the user superuser privileges, run the install, and then take the privileges away.
As much as I'd love to blame this one on Microsoft, I can't. Microsoft does plug and pluy with USB perfectly happily when you're a mere user; I can attach cdroms and disks when I'm logged in as plain old me, and they'll work. No, I'll blame this on Palm, for assuming, even when everyone and their sister is running a version of NT, that the world is all Windows 95.
I wonder if their MacOS 10 implementation of hotsync is similarly braindead.