Problems installing Palm Desktop

Dear Lazyweb,

While I wait to get a registration confirmation email from the palmOne support forum, perhaps you can help solve this problem.

I’ve been trying to install version 4.1.4 of Palm Desktop on my Windows XP (Home Edition) machine without much success.

Here’s the problem…

It requires Administrator privileges to install. So I switch to my Adminstrator account and install it. So far, so good. It runs fine for the adminstrator account.

When I switch back to my ‘Limited’ user account, the account that use for my day-to-day computing, there are a few problems:

1. All of the shortcuts have been installed to the Adminstrator’s start menu. This is easy enough to fix. I just move them to ‘All Users’ start menu manually.

2. When I launch the Palm Desktop program as a limited user, I get the following error message, “Error: Invalid Configuration. Terminating the Palm Desktop.”

Right. Thanks for the helpful message. What am I supposed to do now?

Update (2005-11-16): I solved the problem by temporarily granting adminstrator privileges to my limited account and installing the software under that account. When I was done, I switch the account back to limited. Seems to work now.

Update (2006-01-29): R Burgos offers the following solution in the comments:

  1. Install the software under an administrative account.
  2. Run the windows registry editor and find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREPalmSource, then right click on this key and make sure you add your limited user account to the list of accounts with unlimited privileges. Exit regedit.
  3. Go to the :/Program Files/PalmOne folder and right click on it. Make sure you add your limited user to the list and grant full control.
  4. Log-Off from the Administrator account.
  5. Log-in as the limited user. Run the Setup.exe installer for Palm Desktop. It should not ask you this time for administrative permission to install…it should just install and place all the icons in the desktop and start menu.
  6. You are done. Don’t forget to consider a registry backup in case something goes wrong or you change the wrong key etc.
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