Having been involved in a few Windows XP/2003 suite installations now – there seems to be a reoccurring problem with people and their USB devices.
Simply put – if you’re not an admin user of any sort, then the machine will not allow you to add or remove USB devices.
As a security issue, this is fine – especially when you don’t want people faffing around with your systems on a corporate level. In a school where you’ve just installed 30 computers – half of which don’t have floppy or CD drives in – USB is quite desired.
I finally got around to carrying out a serch on the web and found someone mention KB 823732. A jolly helpful article on how to disable a users ability to remove the said privilege. I haven’t tried it yet – but I imagine that the opposite is true to allow users. I’ll put up an additional note if it works.