prompt, go to services tab, check the "hide microsoft services" tab, and if there's a line that says "Steam Client Service" then it's been installed. Even better, you can see that Valve are actually careful to make sure the Steam client service only runs when the Steam client does, as opposed to say the Punkbuster services, which apparently run all the time. Nice. You can install it manually using an elevated cmd prompt to run SteamService.exe in Steam\bin. you're just as likely going to get rooted if you have administrator access to start with as if you had to click an extra button. The difference is that the latter is going to get old fast. If you have UAC on, all user processes run with standard user permissions by default. You have to explicitly elevate with UAC to get rooted, as by definition something running with standard user permissions doesn't have root access. Having UAC gives you an extra layer of protection. I have just reinstalled Windows and now Steam, and this is the message I got when I ran Steam. I have never got this message before during past installations. Is it new? For the first few times that I clicked &lt;&lt;Install Service&gt;&gt;, it would not believe that I had Administrator priviledges despite the fact that I did, but soon afterwards, when I clicked the install button, it then went on to ask me what account to use, without confirming that the service component had been installed. I am