I started playing Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude today. There's a game mechanic where you collect "secret coins" for various purposes. Early on, I found 10 of them in Larry's room, and the HUD recognizes this. Upon reloading however, the HUD now says I have 0 coins, and the coins are no longer there to collect.

Even more strange, when I attempted to start a new game to collect them again, they still don't appear where they are supposed to. A full reinstall was the only way I could get them to appear again, and I'm right back to square one as saving/reloading makes them disappear.

Is this really the intended behavior, and if not can anyone suggest a way to fix this? Thanks very much in advance.

Yep, you should always run the installer with administrator privileges. ;)

The installer doesn't run without admin rights. What could have made a difference is installing it to another location or with UAC disabled or maybe you used another admin account with a standard setup that works with the game. Just installing it with admin rights wasn't the solution.