Wireless needs Local Admin rights to work

Can you try to logon the computer with a different account. Just a regular account (like the normal user) and try again.

If that works there is a problem with the userprofile. If it doesn't work I'll ask for more things to try.

Have not tried another user profile w/o admin rights.  The tricky part of troubleshooting this is the user is in another state so don't have access to the laptop easily.  I will try this though.

If this is a domain computer, then your should be able to connect to a wifi without admin. What the user may be doing is after he connect to wifi a box comes up and ask what is the location of this wifi. He will need to admin to set the location to home(this will lower windows security). What he should do is set the location to public and he should be fine.

Created a test user without local admin rights and the same issue happened -- test user could not connect to wireless -- log back in with somebody with local admin rights -- wireless connects instantly.  
Need more ideas!!!!

Are you using the built in network manger or are you using a intel, dell , etc. If you are using the windows one you not be having problems.

Using the built in Windows 7 Wireless Manager and NOT the IBM Lenovo one.

I am starting to think that you may have a GPO setup that locking out non-admin from connecting to a wifi network.

This is only happening to 1 user in the company -- there are others who use the same laptop model/operating system etc and are not local admins and can connect fine to wireless...

Try uninstalling the Lenovo wireless manager as this may be conflicting with the windows manager.  Also, has this been a problem since the user has had the machine or did it start happening after working fine for a period of time?

Also, try modifying the security attributes of this registry key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002bE10318}\0008]

It seems from my research that this may be the key to your issue.

When you say modify the security attributes do you mean Rt Click on 0008 and select Permissions and if this is what you mean -- what do you suggest it get modified to?

Yeah it's because a corruption in the profile of the user. Try the registry key bvic01 said. Else rename the usrclass.dat in this location:
%UserProfile%\AppData\Local\Mirosoft\Windows\ do this as admin user. And reboot pc and try again with the wireless connection.

yes that's what i mean, let us know if it works.

EDIT:  sorry, try giving the affected user full permissions.  If that works, try giving EVERYONE full permissions.

When you try to connect to the wifi with the user who has an issue does the wifi connection time out, come back with an error etc, or are the options to connect greyed out and unusable?

did that registry key fix the issue?

Was a odd issue -- just came to point where enough time spent on it -- time to rebuild