Re: Plugins and non-admin accounts

From: Antoine Blanche (antoineblanche_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 01/17/04 

Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2004 13:43:08 +0000

On Sat, 17 Jan 2004 07:15:32 -0600, Shenan Stanley wrote:

> Frankie Chaz wrote:
>> We are in the midst of rolling out Windows XP and just discovered that
>> non-admin users cannot download plug-ins! Can someone suggest a fix be
>> it registry or file system?
>
> 1) Make the users Power Users. This will help some (cause other problems
> too)
> or
> 2) Permissions needed are different for every plugin. Go through each of
> the plugins normally installed and figure out what the users need. or
> 3) If you know the normal plugins installed, install them for the users.

It's a sensible policy really for Limited User Accounts (otherwise what's
the point?). If any Users want a plugin installed, they should ask the
admin to install it. If the admin is using a Limited User account, just
run IE as admin (right click, select 'run as') and install the plugin,
close IE, and relaunch as User. No switching to the Admin account is
required so it's quick and painless.

I'm admin and never login as Admin or Power User myself. Perhaps
something to do with my Unix background but I'd never make a regular (not
fully trusted) user a Power User.

It's high time plugin distributors started to consider User Accounts and
stopped their executables trying to access (or make dll calls to) Admin
restricted areas. Macromedia already make a user account installable
version of Flash for Linux, so why not for Windows?

Software companies take note! 

-- 
Antoine Blanche
Et in Arcadia Ego

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