Admin privileges

[Zman]

In the interest of security and privacy I have set up a my Windows XP Home
system (now with SP2) with multiple user accounts. I have been frustrated by
an almost complete lack of documentation as to what functions are affected
by administrator privileges (aka: user account restrictions). I have
encountered a number of programs that appear to work under user accounts,
but don't do what they're intended to do, with no error messages of any
kind.

Does anyone know of a source of detailed infornation documenting
"administrator privileges"?

 

[Steve]

There really isn't much documentation necessary for what
is affected by Administrator privileges, since the
Administrator can do every/anything. There are no
restrictions on the Administrator account.

 

[Zman]

Thank you for your quick reply.

I am more concerned with the restrictions placed on "user accounts". I have
a couple of programs that don't work as they should, some producing cryptic
error messages, other without any error messages at all. When I run these
programs using the "run as (admin account)" feature most (but not all) run
as they should. One example is a program to synchronize the system clock
with a time server. The program executes what appears to be normal, but the
clock is not reset (if it needed to be). No error message is produced.
Querying the Microsoft "knowledge base" I find "users" can't reset the
system clock. I would like to know what else "users" cannot do so I don't
waste time trying to make them do what is impossible (because of user
account restrictions).

Since all the hard drives on this sytem are NTFS I have checked the ACL
permissions, but that doesn't seem to be the source of the problems.