Vista's UAC and World of Warcraft

I recently bought a toy computer to play games on, and it happened to come with Vista Super Premium Mocha Lattechino. I've got a techie background so I figured I would give it a go.

My first major decision was that I was going to try to live life as just a normal, unprivileged user. So after setting up the admin account, I made a nice ordinary user account for me. I then tried installing Ventrilo and was pleasantly surprised when it started asking me for password prompts. Welcome to something approaching multi-layer security!

Long story short, I install WoW and Wowmatrix (my addon manager of choice) and go to town. I launch the game from Wowmatrix, everything seems fine. I quit to uninstall some addons, and when I relaunch WoW none of my addons load. Yowza.

So I try to open an addon folder, and the first thing that happens is that UAC kicks in and asks me for my password. Hrm. So by now I am getting the picture that WoW runs in an unprivileged state (which is normal), but then it subsequently does not have the privs necessary to read the addons, which were installed by an admin-privileged instance of Wowmatrix.

All of my folders were set to read-only, and I would try to unset them and it would not stick--UAC kept reverting them. After a fair amount of cursing and some research, I determined that I essentially had 3 options:

1. Disable UAC entirely
2. Make my user account an admin account
3. Grant WoW (and ancilliary programs) the ability to execute as admin

I wanted to avoid 1&2 at all costs-- I come from a *nix background and a dead easy way to prevent a lot of bad stuff from happening is to restrict what can run in the first place. Option 3 does introduce some risk, but it's less risk overall than either 1 or 2. There is still the potential for the WoW executable to do Very Bad Things to my hard drive, but at least in that case I know who to yell at.

After switching to the admin account while keeping my account open (another feature I'm glad they copied shamelessly from Apple, who copied it shamelessly from the Unix world), I found Wow.exe and went to properties > security tab > advanced > and checked the "run as admin for all users" box. Switching back and I confirmed that, voila, all of my addons were working.

I do have to type another password now whenever I launch WoW, but I feel that is a small price to pay for having a less-vulnerable system. Microsoft has finally caught up to the rest of the world in its approach to security, and I would commend them for that. I think better documentation, however, would go a long way towards allowing people to understand what is going on.

So if you happen to stumble across this page in your Google search for Vista UAC and World of Warcraft / WoW problems (gratuitous keyword reusage), I hope you find it useful.