User Account Control and exceptions?

[Gareth]

Could anyone advise on the following problem?

I'm using Vista Home Premium with a Netgear WG111 wireless adapter. The
adapter loads a program on startup - a "wireless assistant" program - which
triggers the User Account Control access box. Unless I manually allow the
program to run on startup it doesn't run. It isn't always feasible for me to
do this and so I have had to disable User Account Control.

Is there a way for me to allow the Netgear wireless assistant program to run
as an exception - in other words to use User Account Control without the
wireless assistant triggering the alert?

Gareth.

 

[GTS]

In general, there is no way to make UAC exceptions for an individual program
or service. Have you looked at Netgears web site for updated software and
drivers?

 

[John]

You might try this. Be sure the Netgear program has Admin rights. I think
you can do that in the Compatibility tab of Properties.
Next, run gpedit.msc and hope you have the ability to edit group policies...
some Vista flavors don't. Navigate to Computer Config--Windows
Settings--Security Settings--Local Policies--Security Options. At the bottom
of the list you'll see the User Account Control list. Find the elevate for
Administrators and change its setting from Prompt to Elevate without prompt.
I assume you are in the administrators group or this won't help. If a
standard user, do the same in the line below the elevate admin line in the
UAC list. Hope that fixes your problem. And remember where these UAC
settings ar because that change often gets unchanged by Vista for no good
reason.


In gpedit

 

[Gareth]

You might try this. Be sure the Netgear program has Admin rights. I think
you can do that in the Compatibility tab of Properties.
Next, run gpedit.msc and hope you have the ability to edit group
policies... some Vista flavors don't. Navigate to Computer Config--Windows
Settings--Security Settings--Local Policies--Security Options. At the
bottom of the list you'll see the User Account Control list. Find the
elevate for Administrators and change its setting from Prompt to Elevate
without prompt. I assume you are in the administrators group or this won't
help. If a standard user, do the same in the line below the elevate admin
line in the UAC list. Hope that fixes your problem. And remember where
these UAC settings ar because that change often gets unchanged by Vista
for no good reason.

Thanks John.

No, the Admin rights box is greyed out in the compatibility tab and I don't
have gpedit (Vista Home Premium).

It's odd that MS didn't factor in the need for legacy type drivers in
providing an easy exception method for User Access Control although I
suppose that this would then have compromised the whole concept of User
Access Control.

This Netgear driver isn't actually a legacy driver either - it is Vista
compatible but as far as I can tell it is basically an update of a XP
driver.

I guess I'm stuck.

Gareth.

 

[Gareth]

In general, there is no way to make UAC exceptions for an individual
program or service. Have you looked at Netgears web site for updated
software and drivers?

Thanks. Yes I'm using the latest driver which claims to be Vista compatible
but just seems to be a minor tweak to an older driver.

Netgear's Vista support is by the looks of it very poor - they ditched early
products by refusing to provide Vista drives (legacy products only by a very
liberal definition of the word) and it seems that even their Vista
compatible products don't fare much better.

Gareth.

 

[Jimmy Brush]

Could anyone advise on the following problem?

I'm using Vista Home Premium with a Netgear WG111 wireless adapter. The
adapter loads a program on startup - a "wireless assistant" program -
which triggers the User Account Control access box. Unless I manually
allow the program to run on startup it doesn't run. It isn't always
feasible for me to do this and so I have had to disable User Account
Control.

Is there a way for me to allow the Netgear wireless assistant program to
run as an exception - in other words to use User Account Control without
the wireless assistant triggering the alert?

Gareth.

Hello,

You can have the program start under your user account via the task
scheduler. When creating the task, put a check next to run with highest
privilege. This will allow the program to start with admin power and
without prompting whenever the task is triggered.

I made a tool that automates this under some scenarios:

http://www.jimmah.com/vista/Administration/autostart_admin_program.aspx

Note that you cannot cause a program to run with admin power on a
non-admin's desktop when they log on.

- JB