Ian Griffiths recently wrote this excellent post on UAC. I’ve been running with UAC ON since Vista RTM’d, and actively developing under Vista. I really don’t see what the problem is. The one area where I question Ian’s logic is regarding where the “blame” lies. I don’t have enough historical context to know which came first - did developers run as admin, and write code requiring “admin” privileges because that was the out-of-the-box behaviour, or did Microsoft make it the out-of-the-box behaviour because that is what the applications are written for (come to think of it, I’m not even sure if a standard user on XP has “admin” level privileges - I think they do). One reason for the “cultural“ problems could be the gradual migration from the 9x codebase, where there was not much point writing “secure” code because the operating system did not have any concept of ACLs on files, which is where everything ultimately resides, to the more secure NT codebase. In either case I think Microsoft could have done more to steer the culture in the right direction sooner, something which they have now doing much more actively. I love the “jumping the shark” sign in Ian’s screen mock-up.