There is no easy answer unfortuneatley. If you can contact the software
publishers for the packages, then maybe they can help. If you want to try to
figure out needed permissions yourself , you could try using a couple of
tools from Sysinternals such as filemon and regmon. This process can be very
tedious. You would have to log onto a computer as a power user and then
invoke filemon [or regmon] with runas using administrator credentials just
before you try to install a program and then view the log for access denied
messages and then keep retrying while documenting the areas where permission
changes are needed and then if you are successful, implement the changes to
see if it works.
Realistically you may find the changes you make are going to make a user
very powerful on the computer to the point where he could run programs or do
things to give himself administrator access. Being a local administrator
does not give a user any extra powers in a domain or on other computers
[assuming passwords are not the same!]. You may be better off making the
user a local administrator and monitoring the computer by enabling auditing
things like account management , policy changes, and logon events to see if
he is abusing his power. There are fairly easy ways for you to reset the
local administrator password if you are concerned about another
administrator locking you out. --- Steve
http://www.sysinternals.com/