Glad to hear it works now. The thing about needing to use the admin account, if you fixed the NTFS permissions now, is probably because you installed the patcher it under the admin account, so it does not find it's registry entries?
The patcher is actually quite sturdy, but if you use it to update several installations like I do (I have one for every language + Test), it helps to know its command line options. You can get them from the EverQuest2Patch.log files it creates.
E.g. for my japanese installation I would use the following:
D:\Sony\Station\Launchpad\LaunchPad.exe /nopatch /multiple "/gamepatchpath:E:\EverQuest II JP" /env:jpmain /lang:ja_JP /game:eq2 /restarted
The bolded part is where I want it to patch to on my system, i.e. the EQ2 folder, the other parts define the language. Might be useful to you if you ever move your installation to another computer/drive again.