Standard user compatibility | The Coffeehouse

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

There's been a lot of talk with this UAC stuff about applications that are compatible with standard users.

It's true that the number of applications that can work without strange workarounds in a limited rights environment has increased since Vista's release. I know this because I'd been running XP as a limited user for years before that.

But as someone who still runs as a real limited user in Vista/7, I still regularly come across applications that don't work. Quite often these apps work fine with the limited administrator token, but they don't work in a real limited user account.

The primary reason is this: too many applications still assume that whoever installs the application will run the application. This manifests in installers writing stuff to %AppData% or HKCU, and then when you try to run under a different account the app complains that data is missing (if you're lucky; if you're not it'll just crash). This is such a stupid thing and it's really Windows installations 101 that an installer should never write user-specific data, and it annoys me to no end. UAC does nothing to force developers to fix this either, because admin accounts are still the default.

Probably the worst offender is ActiveSky X, a weather enhancement add-on for Flight Simulator X. ASX is not only guilty of the above, they also force you to elevate it by means of an embedded manifest. The reason they want you to elevate it is because ASX needs to modify some files belonging to FSX which are usually in Program Files so only an elevated user can write to them. Even if you do have write access to those files (and on my machine that's the case because FSX is on another drive because it's so huge), ASX still forces you to elevate it. That wouldn't even be so bad, except that if ASX is running in a different account than FSX, the two can't connect, so I'm forced to elevate FSX too! Here I had to manually copy files and registry data from one user to the other, and use a resource editor to change the manifest so I can run the app in my own account. That's real user friendly right there.

FSX is often a target for issues like this btw; it uses a dll.xml file to register add-on DLLs which is located in %AppData%. So whenever you install a new add-on that needs to load DLLs into FSX, they'll end up being registered only for the user account that installed the add-on, and you have to manually edit dll.xml to get them working in other accounts.

So, if you write applications, please don't do any of the above. Smiley

LeoDavidson

Another pain I've noticed is stuff like RegEdit which doesn't provide a way, once you're loaded it normally, to elevate to admin when you need to edit HKLM keys. You have to exit it, lose where you were and manually run it as admin.

And if you need to do stuff in both HKCU and HKLM you've got to remember which user the program is running under and switch between the two.

The file permissioning dialogs also have similar problems in some scenarios, including sometimes when running as limited-admin. I've had to kill Explorer.exe and re-start it as (non-limited-)admin in order to edit permissions because the file permissions dialogs didn't think elevation was needed (when it was). Access denied errors instead of elevation prompts.

Ofc. both RegEdit and file permissions dialogs are in desperate need of nuking from orbit for a number of reasons. Smiley

For starters, WTF can't I open two copies of RegEdit at once so I can look at two parts of the registry side-by-side?

WTF isn't there a button to quickly switch between the same keys in HKLM and HKCU?

WTF is the tree view forced on is when it is inherently unsuitable to registry navigation? (Deeply-nested keys with very long names.) Why can't we see both keys and values in the right-hand panel? (I started writing a registry virtual-filesystem plugin for a file manager I used and it's incredible what a difference it makes to be able to navigate the registry without being forced to use the tree. I must finish that at some point.)

Has anyone ever used RegEdit and not come away frustrated? Smiley

As for the file permissions dialogs, what a trainwreck of terrible UI design and an absolute failure, for two OS releases in a row, to refactor them to use UAC properly.

Here's what I filed back in the Win7 beta regarding file permission dialogs (mayeb for Windows 8, eh?):

http://www.pretentiousname.com/misc/win7_filepermdlgs.html

I do dig Windows 7 but man I wish MS would pay some attention to stuff like this that is such a constant annoyance for people doing admin stuff. Far more annoying than the UAC prompts ever were, IMO.