JMich: I first encountered those security options with Win2K, and also on XP, when running as a guest user instead of administrator. The UAC prompt was first introduced with Vista. It basically allowed an administrator user to do things as a normal user, unless asked. XP also has this, but requires two users, a limited one and an administrator one.
rtcvb32: At least two users (
superuser and non) is common for unix systems. Actually if you look there's something like 30 different built in names for various services (
for floppy control, printer... FTP and email...)
Yes. This is about your gut feeling that files accessing %windir% and %programfiles% run extra code, which they don't. Extra code is run if a file requests access to something it doesn't have access to, be it system files, memory another program is using, or hardware. And what the extra code does is basically run the "Run As" prompt, or UAC in Vista onwards.
rtcvb32: What i have read of it does seem correct, but i haven't read through the whole thing yet. And a lot of more interesting things are just going to be silently unnoticed or lost in a sea of information and you can't sort through it even with Google...
Glancing over i know there's an interesting tidbit that's missing for the moment (or i'm bad at searching and scanning it) that the NT kernel originally was created by Sun Microsystems. In that case M$ offered them some high incentives to move over from Sun to M$, and they took it (
we're talking salaries in the 6 figures...), and the source code to the kernel went with them. Once they got the kernel functioning and changed it enough that they couldn't get sued for copyright infringement those programmers were kicked out, last i heard they couldn't get programming jobs again.
Chapter one of the rant, part called
NT: Not-so-new Technology
Windows NT finally appeared to be a step in the right direction. At least the NT product line (which includes Windows 2000, XP and Vista) is the better one. 'NT' stands for 'New Technology', presumably because Windows NT is one of the few keystone products in the history of Microsoft that they didn't buy outright. Instead they hired David Cutler, who had played an important role in the development of VMS at DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation). VMS was a successful and innovative industrial OS in its days, and Digital had been working on it since the 1970's. Cutler took some 20 former Digital employees with him, and he and his team began the development of NT. The project eventually involved hundreds of other coders and testers, but Cutler and his core team of VMS engineers provided most of the know-how that went into NT's kernel code.
As a result, many design principles found in the VMS kernel ended up in Windows NT. (The number and splitting of priority levels in the scheduler, the use of demand-paged virtual memory and the layered driver model are only a few examples of many, many similarities.) The first version of VMS was released in 1977. Without trivializing the efforts of Cutler and his team (they did a lot of work on the project) one has to wonder what Microsoft really means with "New Technology". To illustrate, in a little known out-of-court settlement Microsoft paid DEC $150 million in compensation for using portions of old Digital OS code in Windows NT.
Ehm... New Technology...??
DEC instead of Sun, no mention of salaries, $150 million out-of-court settlement (or was it purchasing of rights?).
Edit:
Another view of the story.
In 1988, Digital executives cancelled Cutler's project and laid off many of its group members. Cutler decided to leave Digital, but before he could do so, Microsoft executives learned of the development and realized they had an ideal opportunity to hire Cutler. At the time Cutler left Digital, the release of VMS was version 5.0 (today's version is 7.1).
JMich: May be a classid case, in which case they can be modified, assuming you do read the documentation. What documentation? 
