Microsoft is indeed hitting limits on system requirements ;)
And if you want to use the new Windows skins and still want a lot of speed, 1GB of RAM is best (I found 512MB a bit slow)

I did check out the DBD::WMI module, and it realy is a great module!
Thumbs up for Corion.
I guess I do have to switch over to WMI.

I was also looking at the privilige list. And if I'm correct on the Vista architecture, it may be possible to run devcon if it's included into the group policy. (I didn't check that out so far).
Thus remaining an issue on the devcon tool itself, it is an unsigned software. Which means, if I'm not mistaken, that when UAC is enabled, it will always query the user for interaction :(
That means that I do have to switch over to another application (like WMI).


Update:
My code itself is very straight forward, and it just calls devcon and captures its output. Afterwards I parse this string.
With WMI, I use the Win32_PnPsingendDriver methode.
The challange I had here was gathering all components belonging to a single device, but I figured that one out.