With a shout out to Mike in the blog comments… he said “I was troubleshooting an installation of QB07 on a 2003 Terminal Server. I had all the security modifications that I have used for the previous versions and it still wouldn’t work. What I discovered is that normal users don’t have but need rights to: Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Common Files\Intuit\QuickBooks\qbregistration.dat I added rights to that file and the program ran properly. Bad news about having to be logged in at the server for the Database Manager. When I called support before installing on our server they never mentioned that to me. I was initially happy they had come up with a solution that didn’t require running full QuickBooks on my server. For the 2006 version I had installed QB running the Database piece on a different computer with a drive mapped to the server and it work fine for us. I may have to uninstall the 07 version and try that trick again.”
I originally could not get QuickBooks 2007 to run without admin rights on a stand alone machine… one I gave “Users” Full control to Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Common Files\Intuit\QuickBooks\qbregistration.dat just like Mike said… it worked like a champ.
The official way to do it from the Intuit folks is to flip it so that the QB runs as a “service”
http://www.threatcode.com/quickbooks_2007.htm
Look at the screen shots here and do that extra step of changing the permissions of the “dat” file.
Link to Getting Quickbooks to run as non admin on a stand alone workstation setup
–> I blogged this to keep track of the best way to install QB07 and run it as a normal user until Intuit updates their documentation.