EDM crashes if non-admin

I hope this hasn't been discussed before, although people do seem to have plenty of problems with the Samsung Easy Display Manager in other scenarios.

I have a N130 netbook running XP SP3 - the EDM runs just fine as an Administrative user but as soon as I log in as a Limited User I get a crash in dmhkcore.exe with a c0000005 exception. This is some sort of access violation, probably a NULL pointer dereference.

The battery manager doesn't work either - this fact alone indicates that Samsung expects people to browse the web as Admin. After 10 years of this... They must be mad!

Email to Samsung gets the usual canned response of format, reinstall. Use the latest drivers etc.

Anyone else have this problem or is it just me? I haven't installed anything expect the latest EDM since I bought the laptop.

Thanks.

 

Ok, given that I'm a professional QA engineer, I went and debugged this myself. Grrr. ProcessMonitor is the business really. Took me 45 mins total to make a hypothesis and test it.

So. Trawling through the blizzard of file and registry accesses, there's a suspicious ACCESS DENIED access to lngEng.ini, one of the language files for messages. I changed permissions (using cacls, groan) to give Users Full control to that file and then restarted EDM.

The relevant file is in C:\Program Files\Samsung\Easy Display Manager\minilng\. I simply did something like:

cacls lngEng.ini /E /P Users:F
​

Bingo. Comes up and runs. There are more access denied messages to registry items, but I can't be arsed right now. If it breaks again, I'll take a look.

I'll add this: This is so bad, so unutterably pathetic, cavalier and shameful behaviour from Samsung that I won't be continuing to be a customer. Monitors, printers, nothing. 10 years of rampant malware and companies still assume users are always Administrator. Frankly, it's criminal facilitation.

Have a nice day