I ended up having to manually enable all the services that had been disabled, trying to figure out which ones should be automatic, which ones had to be started (not just made automatic and then come on with the reboot), which ones were dependant on other ones so that they could be started in the correct sequence. Maybe this is a "feature" from Microsoft so that normal users can't hurt themselves by being online with UAC disabled, and maybe this is specific to new releases of Vista Home (everyone else on this thread seemed happy with the instructions), but it was damned annoying whatever it was. The fact of the matter is there are a few points which illustrate why UAC is bad: -"Average users" end up just clicking Allow/Continue all the time anyway, which defeats the purpose when something bad comes along -If your system is already compromised (the only way an unauthorized program would even get to the point of asking you to allow or continue, then there's probably already a loss of security integrity on the system. Yes this may prevent it from getting worse, but I personally wouldn't feel comfortable until formatting/reinstalling. This from a user who installed Vista SP2 and disabled UAC and Windows Defender on Day 1 and have never had a security problem on my PC. For those who wonder why UAC came about for Windows when nothing similar is required for OSX/Linux: Those two OSes have the benefit of inheriting the UNIX-style