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Windows 7 To Dial Down UAC
Barence writes "Engineers working on Windows 7 have admitted Vista's User Account Control was too intrusive, and are promising to tone it down in the forthcoming Windows 7. 'We've heard loud and clear that you are frustrated,' says Microsoft engineer Ben Fathi. 'You find the prompts too frequent, annoying, and confusing. We still want to provide you control over what changes can happen to your system, but we want to provide you a better overall experience.' According to Fathi, when Vista first launched, 775,312 unique applications were producing prompts — so some may be annoyed that it won't be scrapped entirely, but at least Microsoft is listening. The comments echo those of Steve Ballmer, who admitted at a conference in London that 'the biggest trade-off we made was sacrificing security for compatibility. I'm not sure the end-users really appreciated that trade-off.'"
The details only tell you what application is requesting access.
It most certainly does not tell you:
What file - well, that's not completely true, it gives you the file name but not the path!
What the file operation is (read? append? replace? delete?)
Anything that might help you make your decision
And when I said it tells you what application it is, I mean it tells you the process name, which is generally something very helpful like "RUNDLL32.EXE".
Or maybe they are sometimes vague because the program wanting control of the system is vague itself. I remember being glad the UAC actually worked when browsing a webpage recently. It looked like a completely innocent webpage but all of the sudden the UAC panel comes up with a request for who knows what attached to the website. I still am not sure what it was and why it wasn't picked up by the more robust security systems running on my computer.