By now, I'm sure most of you have heard or even seen the new User Access Control prompts in Vista.  These are designed to make sure you are aware when a program requires administrator access to your machine.  It's a good thing, really it is.  There are times when you might want to turn this off and you'll quickly notice that when you do turn it off it will break a whole lot of application settings.

In order to turn it off, you'll need to browse to Start / Control Panel / User Accounts / User Accounts / Turn User Access Control On or Off. This requires a reboot, and once your machine starts up you'll find that applications start acting like they are freshly installed. Registration settings will be gone and all sorts of other weird and funky things happen.  If you're going to turn this off, I suggest you do it the minute you get a new machine and not after you've been using the machine for a while! 

Thankfully, when you turn it back on, all your settings are restored and those applications are back to normal.

I know you're all asking why in the world did he turn it off in the first place?  Easy, I had a number of really large self extracting WinRAR files that I need to unpack.  UAC would take 15-20 minutes to think about the file before it would prompt me to allow it to run. That's fine once or twice,  But I have 16 of these files and each was at least 2GB in size. The file ran instantly after I turned off UAC.  I wish I knew why it took so long for UAC to handle large files, and why things break when you turn it off.  Regardless, you've been warned. I hope you don't think your system is gone all screwy  and rebuild it after turning off UAC.