plonq | So far so good.

I've always felt a bit guilty for running Windows in full Admin mode, but it's such a pain to set up the all the credentials for a more limited account that I've never bothered (and the default "guest" account is WAY too limited to be practical for everyday use, IMO).

Today I had my nose pointed at a cute little program that helps to relieve my conscience a bit. It's a program called Drop My Rights that you patch in ahead of the application that you want to run. Here's what it does in the words of the program's author:

DropMyRights is a very simple application to help users who must run as an administrator run applications in a much-safer context—that of a non-administrator. It does this by taking the current user's token, removing various privileges and SIDs from the token, and then using that token to start another process, such as Internet Explorer or Outlook. This tool works just as well with Mozilla's Firefox, Eudora, or Lotus Notes e-mail.

So far I've tried it with Firefox, Outlook Express, Trillian and Semagic (for which it obviously works or I wouldn't be posting this right now). Like the subject line says, so far so good.