Here's a security tale that will either make you laugh out loud, or pull your hair out (depending on whether you live in Europe and whether you care about Windows *cough* security *cough*). If you have Windows Vista installed in Europe, you can't lock out USB devices unless you install Windows Media Player. Why?

The ability to block read/write access to removable storage devices via Group Policy depends on the presence of the Portable Device Enumerator Service, which is not installed by default in the Vista Business N edition. We discovered this because we accidentally installed this version of the operating system on our test machines. Vista Business N is a Europe-only edition that complies with the EU mandate that Windows Media Player be decoupled from the operating system.

Unfortunately, the Portable Device Enumerator Service comes with Windows Media Player rather than with the base Vista operating system, so the N versions of Vista won't get the feature without installing the Windows Media Player or kludging together a different workaround.

Some people are going to sniff an evil plan from MS here, but I seriously doubt it. I'll echo something I heard Doc Searls say on last week's TwIT podcast - "Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence".

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