I’m trying to set up our first prototype Vista machine here at work so we can have someone out there using it as a guinea pig for what issues may come up before we are forced to move into Vista completely (that is, once the downgrade option is gone).
Unfortunately, I’ve been running into strange problems related to security.
UAC has been disabled. There are two users set up on a Vista Ultimate laptop. Both are part of our company domain that have been assigned as local Administrators in the user settings control panel area.
The first user account is mine. I am also a Domain Admin, and I have been able to do Admin functions in Vista. However, the second user set up is the person who is going to be test-using this Vista machine. In trying to set up his desktop and troubleshooting some slow performance problems, and in doing so, I’ve run into situations where Vista believes he is not an administrator.
For example, it refuses to allow me (when logged on as the regular user), to enable Windows Defender. It says access denied. The user’s account was also denied permission to change the domain, and denied permission to uninstall Microsoft Office ( I had another issue that required reinstalling office). However, when I go into the User Controls, he is listed as being an administrator. In the domain he is a normal user.
Also, we don’t have any group policies set to prevent local machine actions. On Windows XP machines, people connected to the network can do pretty much anything on their local machines, including installing and uninstalling stuff. So, I don’t think its the domain, unless Vista handles domain policy in a much stranger manner.
I’ve been searching for the answer to this weird situation and I found a possible explanation, involving an inconsistent WMI database. So I ran an elevated command line shell and ran the commands suggested to repair it. However, access was denied repeatedly (they suggested that it may take three attempts for the WMI fix to work, I tried it over 10 times, all failed with access denied.)
This was the only place I could think of to get some advice on the issue, I’m still eagerly waiting for the release of IT Stackoverflow. I’m just looking for any hints as to how to proceed here, I will “run with the ball” once I have a clue what to do.