Hi Michele,
In the coming release (and already if you are making your own build from svn trunk), there is a new Permissions tab in Site Settings under the Security tab. There you can define roles not allowed to edit module settings. So users who have edit permission can edit but if in a role designated here they cannnot edit module settings.
In the previous releases it was a all or nothing thing, if you had edit permissiosn you could edit settings (except role permissions unless an admin).
You can see this on the demo.mojoportal.com site now.
Hope it helps,
Joe