The Tenuous Link

I quite like Windows Vista; it's OK. I use the 64-bit "Ultimate" edition of Vista in preference to XP on my home machine, and it lets me use 6GB of RAM and the 4 CPU cores seem to chug along, and most things work mostly as I expect, which is about as good an experience as I ever hope for when using a computer.

Yes, User Access Control boxes pop up, but I click them and get on with my life. They aren't annoying enough to me that I bothered to disable them.

Anyway, here's something I just found that has annoyed me. I use the downloaded installer of Nero 8 (DVD/CD writing and editing software). I've paid for my license key, but saved a few Euro's by not getting the disk posted to me, and instead download the currently 185MB installer file. Nero have saved about 2.5 MB by not including the help files in that bundle. That means if I click help in any application then I see a stub file telling me to download the proper help file from the Nero web site. That's annoying all by itself, and nothing to do with Vista.

However, when I do download the help files that I want to read, Vista knows that the help file has been downloaded, and wants to protect me from any nasty things that might lurk inside. So, when I try to open the help file I see two things:

1. I *always* get asked if I really want to open the file, even though I deselect the "Always ask before opening this file" check box .
2. I'm not allowed to see any or the text or images in the help file, just the contents tree and index. Each page displays

   Navigation to the webpage was canceled    
      What you can try: 
        Retype the address. 
   

Nero seem to be aware of the problem and the suggestion on their web site is to view the properties for the help file and click the "Unblock" button. Unfortunately for me this selection is not remembered, and does not help me to read the file.

The cause of my problem is that after I downloaded the zipped help file I copied the content of the zip directly to the Program Files folder, or "Program Files (x86)" on my machine, to replace the stub help file. This caused a UAC dialog box to pop up so that I could confirm that I was happy with what was going on, and which I clicked yes for.

Confirming the UAC request then completes the copy operation with "administrator" rights. Even though the account I use in Windows is an administrator account almost everything that I do happens with normal user access rights, except for the few operations that cause UAC to prompt me. That's probably often a good thing, but right now it's stopping looking at my help file, or letting me mark it as safe for me to look, at because the file was written by administrator, and as a user I can't modify it in any way.

For executable files the Windows shell lets me right-click and choose "Run as adminstrator", but there is no "Open as administrator" option. Instead I have to look at the file properties, edit the security settings (saying "Yes" to the UAC prompt that this generates) and allow Modify access for Users. Then double click the help file, and *if* I uncheck the "Always ask before opening this file" I can open the file and view the content.

I suppose if I was actually interested in security on this machine I should then go back and remove the Modify and Write access for the file to avoid some User process inserting nasty content in to my now unprotected help file. Maybe I could have temporarily disabled UAC while copying the help files, but however I do it I think it's too many clicks to justify shaving 2% from the installer download size.

// posted by Steven @ 8:37 PM 0 comments