Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Why I'm not using UAC

Lots of people keep saying I should switch User Access Control on. So I thought I'd give it a try since I wanted to see how painful it was or if it was actually not so painful after all. And of course I'd like my software to run with UAC enabled without causing any issues.

But here's the problem. Vista is already screwed up on my machine, what with no sound, a SonicWall VPN client that screws up TCP/IP and complete machine freezes every couple of days. And UAC makes it even worse! Internet Explorer has some serious problems when UAC is enabled. It won't print, links that open new windows don't work and the dropdown menu on the back button doesn't work. Explorer always opens folders in a new window, even though it is set up to reuse the same window. Lots of applications won't work at all unless I run them as administrator (Visual Studio being the obvious example) which rather defeats the point of UAC. And these are the problems I've found after using UAC for about two days so there are bound to be more.

And of course I've not even mentioned the annoying dialogs that appear fairly regularly to disrupt my workflow.

So in principle using UAC may be a good thing and dogfooding it constantly with my own code would be a nice thing to do, but in practice it is too painful and I'm putting it back in its box until SP1 comes out. 

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