I think it might be better if those nodes redirected to another node with appropriate content if you don't have permission to view them.

As for the specific example of Other Users, if could redirect to ShowOtherUsers; the chatterbox could redirect to something like FullPage Chat; the free nodelet to Free Nodelet Settings.

The static nodelets should probably redirect to their documentation. Maybe it would be the best approach to do this with all nodelets, then those sitedocs could link to alternate views of the same information for dynamic nodelets (like the Chatterbox FAQ already does). This would make sense because the information for some nodelets are available in multiple different forms.

(Comparing to perlmonks, E2 has more dynamic data in their nodelets. They too have some variant of those informations in separate nodes, e.g. Everything Finger, Squawkbox, Chatterlight, Everything New Nodes. Some of these links require a login cookie to the www.everything2.org domain. They also have xml tickers for most of these.)