Quote Originally Posted by SilverWarior View Post
I definitly would not recomend disabling UAC. Why? While UAC can be quite anoying sometimes by all those "Consent requests" it can increase your computers security quite a bit.
For instance if you disable UAC then any program started with normal user privilegies can acces any file in any folder on your computer. This means it can easily change your system files and therefore compromise your system security.
WindowsXP had one big security flaw. You could have easily make windows to load modified dynamic link library instead of correct system one by simply copying dynamic link library with the same name into "C:\Windows" while original file was under "C:\WIndows\System32".
So why did windows load your modified DLL instead of defult system one in this case?
When DLL's are being loaded Windows first searches for certain DLL in the folder of the application which is trying to load such DLL and if it doesen't find it there it then tries to find it in folders that are entered into system PATH eviroment variable. And since "C:\Windows" folder was specified before "C:\Windows\System32" this reulted in loading DLL from "C:\Windows" instead.
Same goes for starting various system executables.

Most common use of this security flaw was to force Windows to load modified Svchost.exe instead of default one. So with it you gained full controll over all services that were running on a computer. So viruses utilizing this could create specific keyloging services and hide them from user or even kill Antivirus services.
One of the viruses that used this approach was Salinity NSF.

I learned about this when my friends computer got infected by Salinity NSF and I had to clean it up.


Now in order for some program to cause same infection with UAC turned on such program needs to be started with elevated privilegies (Run as Administrator).

So I strongly disadvise of turning of the UAC. Instead installing program into different folder which is not protected by UAC can solve most of your problems.
your advice is right, but also keep in mind you are not alone, a good anti virus is a must to prevent further infections. my proposal was only to help running a quite older delphi compiler. in a time, i just walked that road and do some workanround to make it work. first thing i did, was to turn off uac, then i moved to delphi 7, then delphi 2007, now i'm a step before embracing fpc+lazarus, the only thing that stops me now is a huge code legacy, rewriting or adapting it is a big task to do.