Thoughts on Vista, without trashing it. (EG - What do you like about it?)

[xierox]

I really love the UAC once I began to understand its core more. The fact that it completely protects the registry when its setup properly is completely worth the annoyance once in a while. I'm not an expert on Flash 8, but I don't understand why it would be wanting registry access all the time (which is what triggers the UAC) when you are doing import/editing functions.

This is incorrect. UAC prompts do not trigger only on registry modifications. (And I'm sure there are some parts of the registry that are modifiable without any UAC notification. Anything HKEY_Current_User strikes me as likely being modifiable without a UAC prompt.)

The reason for this is because when you log onto Vista with UAC turned on, you are assigned two security tokens. One is the standard (restricted) user token with which all processes are run by default. The second is the "administrative" (unrestricted*) access token. If a running process tries to access somewhere (or do something) that it cannot access (or do) with the restricted access token, then you will receive a UAC prompt asking you to escalate the privileges of that process. If you give it the go-ahead, then the unrestricted token is attached to the process and it now is effectively running with administrative rights.

This should give a good overview of UAC: http://technet2.microsoft.com/Window....mspx?mfr=true

- X

*this presumes that you haven't modified your system's default ACL's or privileges. By default, the administrative token should be able to change anything on the system.