I wouldn't encourage anyone to use that approach. Many of the protections afforded by UAC are bypassed when running as _the_ local Administrator account. While UAC in Vista was annoying enough that most users, myself included, turned it off--I run with it enabled in W7, and we lock it on by GPO at work on all W7 deployments.
Either way, the issue here is that the directories the OP is used to aren't real directories, they're NTFS junction points for legacy poorly written software that doesn't use environment variables, as has already been mentioned. Greg -----Original Message----- From: hardware-boun...@hardwaregroup.com [mailto:hardware-boun...@hardwaregroup.com] On Behalf Of Winterlight Sent: Saturday, December 19, 2009 1:36 PM To: hardware@hardwaregroup.com Subject: Re: [H] Win2K/XP to Vista/Win7 Log in as THE administrator... not a user with administrator privileges. The first thing I do with Win 7 or Vista is to create the administrator account from the Command line = et user administrator /active:yes and then use THE administrator account as my account so I do not run into these problems.