What to do with a new Vista PC

[Husar]

It doesn't actually show them there to the user; they're stored in users/[user]/appdata/local/virtualstore/ and can be edited as per usual. UAC simply redirects read/write requests for the game to there, and from the program's perspective, there's no real difference.

Ehh, no, I made the experience myself.
I had this program that needed a certain file telling it I bought the program, I put the file into the folder and Vista showed it to be in the folder, sounds about right, doesn't it?
Yeah, but the program was still running in demo mode, I restarted etc, checked back, the file was still in the correct folder, it wasn't empty, it was apparently right where the program wanted it but the program ran in demo mode which it shouldn't when the file is where it looks for it. So I started to google and found out about this, turned UAC off, copied the file to the folder again and voila, everything worked fine as it should.

The devs of the program in question circumvented the problem now by setting the standerd installation path to something else than the standard windows program files folder because that's the only one where this protection applies, you could easily circumvent it yourself by installing your modded games into a different folder.

[sapi]

Ehh, no, I made the experience myself.
I had this program that needed a certain file telling it I bought the program, I put the file into the folder and Vista showed it to be in the folder, sounds about right, doesn't it?
Yeah, but the program was still running in demo mode, I restarted etc, checked back, the file was still in the correct folder, it wasn't empty, it was apparently right where the program wanted it but the program ran in demo mode which it shouldn't when the file is where it looks for it. So I started to google and found out about this, turned UAC off, copied the file to the folder again and voila, everything worked fine as it should.

Sorry mate, read my post again: Vista redirects both write failures, and read failures, to virtualstore - if you put the file in program files, you're putting it in a location that the program is not allowed to even look at. You need to stick with the Vista data conventions (ie, all user files go in the user directory) and put any new files in virtualstore yourself.

The devs of the program in question circumvented the problem now by setting the standerd installation path to something else than the standard windows program files folder because that's the only one where this protection applies, you could easily circumvent it yourself by installing your modded games into a different folder.

Talk about going out of their way to circumvent security