Vista - Removable devices access denied

First, I am not a newbe and this is not the Group Policy lockout error.
I have done an upgrade from XP to Vista Ultimate on my personal WS, a 3.0 P4
with 3gb mem and lots of HD. The upgrade from XP was eventfull with
recoveries from BSD a few times. After It got up all was well and the for
some reason it locked down all the removable devices (DVD,USB..) I checked
the GP on the box and set it to allow the devices (no luck), checked the
Domain GP and set them just in case.

It will not even allow the local Admin for the box access (Red Slash). I
suspect the rights for the stack setup to be the problem, but can not be
sure. One potential is that when the system came out of one of it's many BSD
it asked for a reset of admin PWD (I reset it to the same it was just in case
it was store on service starts).

Other than that I am at a standstill. I can map DVD's across to one of the
servers but the walk to server room is getting to be a pain).

Any help greatly appreatiated
Dan