Monday, August 7, 2006

Newsflash! I'm an administrator

Ok so I finally got tired of hitting the remind me later button when asked
if I wanted to download the Windows desktop search update when starting
Outlook. I valiantly tried this on my x64 desktop only to discover that
there isn't a 64 bit build available. No problem, my laptop is XP SP2 so
this should be a breeze.

Near the end of the install, this message pops up. Access denied. Huh? It
had asked me if I wanted it to close Outlook automatically (I said yes) so I
figured that Outlook had disobeyed (it had). I forcefully closed Outlook
and tried again. Bzzt. Access denied. Hmm. Ok, must be some files in
use. Reboot. Bzzzt. Access denied.

After some googling, running Regmon, and trying unsuccessfully to turn on
verbose logging (which I now remember is STILL on), I got it installed. The
problem? Some of the registry keys under HKCR did not allow administrators
to read or write them. You read that right. The most powerful entity in
the universe (on this computer) can't read or write those keys. So my
question is "who the hell is supposed to write them if users and
administrators can't?"

Newsflash Microsoft! Administrator means I can do ANYTHING I want on my
computer. A small warning might be in order but I should not be disallowed.
Now we can argue about whether running as admin is smart but the fact
remains that as long as I am running as administrator, I should not EVER
have security issues with what I am doing.

Ok, I'm calm now. Sanity can resume....

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