I am sorry to say this but Vista UAC is broken! I understand the concept, and I understand where Microsoft is coming from. In fact, I felt quite comfortable the way Ubuntu has implemented basically the same idea. But it is just painful in Vista.
I tried to work with it but got fed up soon. So, I disabled it using Local Group Policy. And then, my problems started. I did not realize it until today but UAC was the reason behind a couple of mysterious issues I was having. A few recent examples...
* NTFS permissions are all screwed up. Although my user account is in Administrators/backup operators groups, I sometimes can not access my personal folders. Then, I have actually blogged this here, so I wont go into details...
* My backup process got broken. I loved rsync in unix world and the closest thing I have in Vista is of course good old Robocopy. I already had some backup scripts that would take daily back ups between my various disks and PCs. Time to time, I would get mysterious errors like "ERROR 5 (0x00000005) Changing File Attributes"...
* Windows update would never install 'any' update. It kept on downloading the files and then reported errors but never offered any explanation why.
Finally, I suspected that UAC was not fully disabled. I saw a nicely written article and used msconfig method (Run msconfig > Tools > Disable UAC).
And guess what? Suddenly all looks good now :)
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