I’ve been using Windows Vista’s User Access Control (UAC) on my computers for some while. When I first started using Vista at home, I turned it off, but then turned it back on just to see how I’d get on with it.
Roll forward two years, and I’m now running Vista Ultimate 64-bit and 32-bit on my home desktop and laptop PCs respectively, plus Vista Business Edition on my work desktop and laptop PCs. I was seeing UAC prompts ALL DAY at work. Opening Active Directory Users and Computers would cause the prompt to appear. Going near any sort of management tool would cause it to appear. I was getting fed up with seeing it!
So I decided I’d had enough and turned it off on both my work PCs. I also switched it off on home laptop. In each case, it quietly went away, and that was that. My home PC wasn’t quite so straight-forward.
Vista has a rather nice new feature whereby it will re-direct any files and folders being dropped into Program Files or the Windows directory to a folder in the current user’s application data folder (C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore – it’s hidden, so you might not see it). This, however, only happens if you have UAC enabled. So having switched it off, I rebooted, and found some of my applications suddenly thought they weren’t registered or setup.
I went into the VirtualStore folder, and found this:
Oddly enough, Dream Aquarium, DMT and Objectdock were all the apps complaining at me about licences and lost configs. The fix was quite simple. I basically copied the contents of those directories into the corresponding directories in C:\Program Files (x86)\ (as it’s vista x64). Restarted the apps, et voila, they suddenly work.
It’s a shame turning off UAC doesn’t give you the option to merge the virtualstore back into Program Files, but then again it could make things even more confusing if you turned UAC back on, as suddenly applications wouldn’t be able to write to those files, so would fail miserably. I’ve had a few things do that randomly in the past.
So if you’re going to turn off UAC, it’s probably best to do it when you first install Windows.