I posted previously about an irksome acer wireless where the power saving decided to disable the wifi card but the user did not have the security settings to enable it again.
Well it happened again for a user today, only someone had deinstalled the Acer power management tools so there was no way for them to enable it. Log in as administrator, wifi fine, log in as mere power user, no wifi.
I was in a hurry as user was having a bad day so I went straight for a search through the registry for 'wireless'. One of the first entries I found was within some Acer registry settings, with a registry key for the user's login name and a key called WirelessEnabled set to 0. I set it to 1, logged out and back in and wifi was fine.
What beats me is why the security settings stopped the user turning the wifi card on but they still had permissions to edit the registry and change this setting.
Next problem is to figure out how this got disabled but I might worry about that when it happens. I exported the fixed registry key and showed the user how to import it back in if the wifi dies again during a critical client meeting.
Peter's Moblog
