14 DAY TRIAL // Although Microsoft strongly recommends against turning off User Account Control in Windows Vista, it has also enabled this action. Addressed exclusively to power users, and - in a much larger sense - security developers that need to take control of the operating system without the UAC getting in the way, Tim Sneath, Windows Vista Technical Evangelist has blogged about disabling the User Account Control on a Vista system.
"This approach is pretty brute-force, though. It just switches the whole thing off. There's a more subtle configuration choice that gives you some of the benefits of UAC without any of the prompting. You'll need to edit the local security policy to control this, as follows: from the Start search bar, type "Local Security Policy," accept the elevation prompt, from the snap-in, select Security Settings -> Local Policy -> Security Options, scroll down to the bottom, where you'll find nine different group policy settings for granular configuration of UAC. Perhaps the best choice to select is to change the setting: User Account Control: behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode from Prompt for consent to Elevate without prompting," wrote Sneath.
This means that processes marked for elevation will run under full administrative privileges, while unmarked processes will prompt an access denied error message, because they run under the privileges of a standard user. This is the case as the UAC is still active.
"Windows Vista attempts to give you the benefits of both worlds (bundling admin and standard user privileges) by allowing administrators to execute most processes in the context of a standard user and only elevating the privileges on their user token by consent, in addition to allowing standard user accounts to perform administrative tasks by selectively elevating a process to use administrator-level credentials," stated Sneath.