of privilages. Your account, however, is not the same as the Adminstrator account (which is disabled by default). Similar problems exist in NT-based systems when running processes using Administrator as with root on *nix systems. If a program is installed as Administrator and it improperly reads and writes to HKLM instead of HKCU or stores settings in %ProgramFiles%, then non-privilaged users will be unable to properly use that program. UAC blends file system and registry virtualization with authorized elevation to help address these types of issues. The issues are complex, and I think my original statement that computers are complex tools and not appliances reflects that appropriately. I don't agree with your 4 weeks comment. If it takes 4 weeks extra to write your code properly, then that's what it takes. But if you use constants and properly abstract your code, it shouldn't take more than one day to refactor it to properly using HKCU, %ProgramFiles%, %UserProfile%, %AppData% etc instead of bad decisions like referencing HKLM, hardcoding and/or writing to "C:\Program Files" or %AppDir%. The same holds true for HKLM vs HKCU and applications that assume C:\ etc. This is the root cause of the problem, not UAC. I'm not trying to slam users -- I am slamming bad "programmers" such as the first person I addressed in my comments. And yes, I did it publically because I think users can become educated and start demanding that "programmers" out there fix their crappy code. A personal note: I feel that