Defender does NOT seem to work correctly on Limited User Accounts

[Guest]

According to the MS Windows Defender overview, "Protection technologies for
all users, whether or not they have administrator rights on the computer."

But so far, in the tests I ran, this is NOT the case. While logged in as a
Limited user, Defender does load, and it will perform manual scans. But
real-time protection does not allow a user to decide how to handle any newly
detected items. The screen is locked at the "Permit" choice and no entry is
made in the Allowed Items history log. And the tray icon is frozen with the
question mark symbol. I tried changing permissions on several Defender
related folders with no improvement.

I thought that maybe this was something broken only in the final release so
I rolled back to an image before the Defender installation and installed
Defender Beta 2. It too seemed to be broken under a Limited account.

Is there anything I'm forgetting? As it now stands, Defender is unusable for
me and my Limited account. Which is a shame because in many ways, it looked
like the way to go... :-(

 

[Bill Sanderson MVP]

Have you logged in as an administrator, and gone to tools, options, and
scrolled all the way to the bottom, and chosen the option there?

 

[Guest]

Bill: Yes, I did double check everything in both cases. FWIW, in all of the
Defender Installations I've setup (around 8 or 10), the last setting to allow
all users to run scans etc. has always been turned on by default. (All of
these installations have been under Admin accounts. Which explains my very
recent discovery of the Limited account woes.)

 

[Bill Sanderson MVP]

You are not the first person to post this.

Seeing that this seems to be checked by default, I wonder whether the fix
might be to go in, as administrator, uncheck, recheck, and then hit save?

So--it'd be a bug, but a bug about how the setting is saved, and not the
basic functionality.

I'm afraid that I only have one client office that always runs as limited
users, and I don't see them much--not sure how this is working for them.

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