Win7 Security

Please bear with me; I'm sitting at home and working from memory (with a few
bad chips). I work part-time from home; the office is 30 miles away.



Yesterday I had to go to the office (first time in about 3 months) because
they had acquired a new computer running Win7 and had to install Client
Access 7.1 so that the user could run Data Transfer from the System i (V5R1,
FWiW) to the PC. The original definition, which they had used for years
created the file in the root directory (C:\); the file will later be sent to
a clearinghouse of sorts using their custom utility. When I re-created the
.DTF, exactly as it existed on the old computer, Win7 told me that I wasn't
authorized to put the file in the root directory. As a test, I tried
creating a Word document and saving it to the root directory; got the same
error.



Using Windows Explorer I looked at the Properties...Security for C:\.
Interestingly (to me, never having used Win7 before) was that there was one
user defined for the PC, but she was listed twice; once as an administrator
and again as a user. As an administrator she has full access, but as a
user, she has limited access to C:\. Talking on the phone with the guy that
set up the PC, I gathered he knew as much about Win7 security as I do
(zilch). Another PC (we'll call it PC-2), which was set up over a year ago
with Win7, had the same security set up: one user account and that same user
as ad administrator. It, however, allowed me to save a Word document to
C:\.



Anyway, in my infinite wisdom I decided to set the user account to full
access for C:\. Probably (okay, definitely) not the brightest idea I had
yesterday. It started telling me that access to such-and-such was denied.
Clicked "Continue" several times and then, finally, decided this wasn't such
a good idea. Most things for which she uses the PC (PC5250, email
[Outlook], browsing [Firefox], and Office) seem to work, but the Data
Transfer now says something along the lines (working from memory here) of
"Not authorized to a privileged function" and doesn't name the function or
provide any help text.



I couldn't sleep worrying about what I probably did to screw up that PC so I
searched on Win7 security and found some explanations of why the user has
two settings: User and Admin. All well and good, but I could not find
anything about how to run the PC, either in toto or my application, as an
administrator. I'm guessing, sitting here at my XP Pro PC, that PC-2 must
have been set up to run as admin or I could not have saved that test
document to C:\. But I didn't think about that until this morning, and I
don't have the luxury of driving the 30 miles to the office until next week
to poke around (which I rpobably did too much of already).



So, I my questions are:



1. How badly did I mess up PC-1?

2. Is there a way to run the PC, in toto, under the admin account settings?

3. Is there a way to define a specific application (desktop icon) to be run
as admin?



Thanks.



Jerry C. Adams

IBM i Programmer/Analyst

Beauty is skin deep; ugly goes right to the bone.