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User Account Control (UAC) is one of the key security mechanisms introduced in Vista. In the past, the default account as an administrator. Following the principle of least privilege , the default Vista account runs with limited access, and Vista detects when something requires "administrator prompts", as mocked in the most recent Mac ad. All told, this is a good thing. Unfortunately, Microsoft made some poor design decisions in the implementation, sacrificing some of the security for ease of use. Joanna Rutkowska summarizes the issue : One thing that I found particularly annoying though, is that Vista automatically assumes that all setup programs (application installers) should be run with administrator privileges. So, when you try to run such a program, you get a UAC prompt and you have only two choices: either to agree to run this application as administrator or to disallow running it at all. That means that if you downloaded some freeware Tetris game, you will have to run its installer...
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