John,

I personally agree, that the current solution is suboptimal from a UI perspective and will have a look into the code or bring it to the core teams attention respectively. Thank you.

I use Catalook and have found that when I give edit page permissions to a non-admin role (or non-host role) the control panel is still displayed. I need to give the "manager" role access to edit products but not the page. I tried this in the module settings but the permissions don't work for some reason. I've also tried a code posted by John Mitchell which is a conditional code that dispalys content based on isinroles for the administrator. I'm not sure if there's a simple solution to this or if there is something in DNN that is keeping me from doing this. I'm interested to hear what you guiys have to say. Thanks!

Maybe I'm not sure. I followed a particular course when I installed 4.5.3:

1. Fresh install of 4.5.3
2. Fiddled with the Usability Settings
3. Set-up a couple of portals
4. Added users

  I then noticed that they could not edit the modules. I fiddled with the Usability Settings some more, and now the users can see edit the modules. It may have took some time for the changes to take effect, because when I initially made the changes to the Usability Settings, I still could not edit the modules, and instead had to make the Control Panel Mode viewable. Might have been cache thing, or maybe I was also login in as one of the users at the time the changes were made.
  I think the moral of the story is, don't fiddle with the Usability Settings unless you know what your doing.

Mark