Do Activities use resources differently than Services

Do Activities use resources differently than Services

I have a usb driver that I am trying to use to enumerate a usb device. It
all works fine when I access the driver from an Activity project, but not
when I access the same driver in the same manner from a Service project.
Stepping through all of the code, it appears that the only difference is
that the Service is not passing the device_filter.xml resource file to the
driver like the Activity appears to do. If I remove the device_filter.xml
from the Activity project res directory, it acts like the Service and
cannot find the usb device.
Ultimately, my question is, how do I use the device_filter.xml from the
Service?