Outlook, BatteryBar and Administrative Permissions

[Sovereign]

I just learned something while recovering my laptop from a hard drive crash. BatteryBar avoids a reboot by killing, then restarting, explorer.exe during installation. The installer has Administrative permissions (as expected), but that means the restarted explorer.exe also has Administrative permissions.

Apparently, this long chain of admin-ness reaches to applications pinned to the Taskbar, as Outlook (2007, 2010 at least) will also launch with admin permissions. The problem is that with Administrative permissions, Instant Search becomes disabled.

Here's the source that I found when Googling the phrase "instant search is not available when outlook is running with administrative permissions." It's the fifth one.

This Outlook problem is by no means program-breaking, but a warning for new users might be a good idea, a FAQ entry, or something! Otherwise people who have pinned Outlook (or any other program that's sensitive to being launched with Admin permissions, such as certain games who rely on file virtualization to store profile info--example Call of Duty 4) to their Taskbars might spend hours freaking out, as I did.

[Chris]

The short term alternative would be to ask people to reboot after the upgrade.

I'm working on modifying the installer to avoid that scenario, but it's fairly complicated because the installer has to run in two parts, one without admin privileges and one with them.

[Sovereign]

Obviously, you're the developer and programmer, not me. However, I'd support the forced reboot just to avoid the confusion that a user would experience from this.