Originally Posted By: tmorris1
I agree, but unfortunately many programs, especially games, don't even run without admin rights.
My wife, a high school teacher, uses some school board supplied report card and class management programs that actually *keep the user configuration data* in C:\Program Files\$program_name! As I understand it, many games do this, too... It's such a bad decision, with so many pitfalls and no real benefits that I can see; and I wonder why on earth software makers continue to do this.
I try to make a practice of sending companies that make software that keeps config or user data in locations other than user space (or otherwise requires admin rights to run it) a long lecture via email; and their responses, not counting the dismissive form responses I get from 75% of them, all harken back to a backward-compatibility excuse: They've been making this software and licensing it to the board since 199x, and to modify user permissions, config file locations and such-and-such would bugger up the whole thing. (Translation: We're too lazy to re-write the program the way it shoulda been done in the first place. We'd rather burden a school's IT person.)
When setting up a WinXP system, I used to rename the Administrator account to "NoNetwork" or something to that effect; hoping that intruders would not opt to try to get into that (seemingly useless) account, and bots would not bother with it. I would then create an "Administrator" account with *zero* priviledges and an absurdly long password; hoping that the decline in morale after hacking into a fake account would drive script kiddies to greener pastures. The users would run the system under their user account with normal user priviledges. (Games and report card programs not withstanding!) My hope was that with proper backups, even if a hacker wiped the whole account, the OS would remain untouched, or at least reparable, and a quick restore of the user's data would put us right back in the ring.
