City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Windows 7 Shortcut always asking for permission

Aggelakis

By Aggelakis,
Posted on: 2010-07-07 02:12 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs

 

Posted

I got a new computer with Windows 7 Home Premium installed on it, had no problem installing the game, nor any issues running it, but every time I go to launch the game from the shortcut I always get the Windows 7 message as to whether I want to "allow this computer to make changes to the system". This doesn't happen with WoW or CO, so I'm wondering what I can do to get Win 7 to not ask me this every time for CoH.

Thanks in Advance!

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Aggelakis View Post
Right-click, run as Administrator.
That just tells Windows to ask you.


There's two things you need to do to get CoX to work without Administrator access.
  1. You need to give your user (or the 'Users' group, if multiple user accounts on the system use CoX) ownership of the City of Heroes installation directory. It's usually installed in C:\Program Files\City of Heroes (32bit windows) or C:\Program Files (x86)\City of Heroes (64bit windows). See this website for a detailed walkthrough (applicable to both Vista and 7).
  2. You need to selectively override UAC, so the built-in heuristics won't trigger an automatic elevation due to the 'update' substring in cohupdater.exe. Follow this article using the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit to selectively override cohupdater.exe (in the installation directory you just changed ownership of).



To-da! You now have a completely UAC-free user experience, without horribly crippling your system's security! I'd, personally, like to see this process streamlined (CoX far predates UAC), but I don't think that'll happen anytime soon due to the complexity of the huge preexisting user base.

Quote:
Originally Posted by ShadowNate
;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

 

Posted

OR, you can just disable the UAC completely if you trust yourself (and anyone else using the computer) to not do anything stupid...

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by ElectroHawk View Post
OR, you can just disable the UAC completely if you trust yourself (and anyone else using the computer) to not do anything stupid...
My solution doesn't require a reboot, or lower your system's security

Quote:
Originally Posted by ShadowNate
;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitsune Knight View Post
My solution doesn't require a reboot, or lower your system's security
for the reboot.. well it's windows 7 .. 20sec your back online

for the security: I did mentioned to do it only if you trust yourself enough

And my solution works for every program and only has to be done once

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by ElectroHawk View Post
for the reboot.. well it's windows 7 .. 20sec your back online
And you lose your system state There's a reason Microsoft has worked to limit the number of activities that force a restart.

Quote:
for the security: I did mentioned to do it only if you trust yourself enough
You also have to trust all your programs completely, then, as they'd be run as full Administrator with 100% access all the time (or you're running as a Limited User and you break a lot of functionality & ease of use)

Quote:
And my solution works for every program and only has to be done once
Your solution: shotgun. My solution: high precision laser that doesn't kill an orphan

Quote:
Originally Posted by ShadowNate
;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitsune Knight View Post
My solution doesn't require a reboot, or lower your system's security
While I can understand your point, the curmudgeon in me fails to recognize "Are you sure? Are you really sure? Are you REALLYREALLY extra-mega-super-special sure?" as "security". Mainly due to eventual user acclimation/conditioning to auto-click YES.

This was tried with web browsers back in the mid-90's and failed miserably.

Additionally, TECHNICALLY, your "solution" DOES compromise system security by creating a directory for things that essentially end-run UAC.


Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Hyperstrike View Post
While I can understand your point, the curmudgeon in me fails to recognize "Are you sure? Are you really sure? Are you REALLYREALLY extra-mega-super-special sure?" as "security". Mainly due to eventual user acclimation/conditioning to auto-click YES.
The amount of notices a user should see should be EXTREMELY limited (with the exception of (un)installing an application, I probably see zero a month). Microsoft tried to make them annoying to tell application developers to stop being lazy idiots that still think they're using Windows 95. Every other operating system vendor has already implemented UAC-like technology years ago, which has been a major improvement for their system's security (next, microsoft needs to force the default account to be Limited so UAC is full effective).

Quote:
Additionally, TECHNICALLY, your "solution" DOES compromise system security by creating a directory for things that essentially end-run UAC.
No, it creates a directory that's user/users writable (there's already MANY, including Public and the user's home folder), and set a bit on a single file that tells it to not prompt for UAC and to just run as a regular user (UAC's heuristics notice the 'update' in cohupdate.exe and think it should require elevation). It does not give extra permissions... in fact, it takes them away by not requiring CoX to be run with maximum system access.

Quote:
Originally Posted by ShadowNate
;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

 

Posted

Thanks, this looks really useful.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to actually work, in that after I have created, as described, the compatibility thing telling CoH to run as invoker, it still pops up the same message every time.

Why hasn't this launcher just been fixed to actually work correctly under modern Windows? This seems like a pretty basic question of following the published standards, no?

EDIT: Nevermind, it works once I figure out that it had become set to "run as administrator", and I unset that. That said, the "why do I need to do all this" stands, the game launcher should not need special compatibility settings, I don't think.

EDIT AGAIN: WTF. It defaults to "Run as administrator". If I right-click and pick "open", it works fine, but I can't figure out how to make the default-operation be "open" rather than "run as administrator".

 

Posted

Okay, never mind; that's a property of the short cut. Now fixed to not run as admin or with special privs.

As to the security question: Disabling UAC in general strikes me as pretty dangerous and unwise. Too many things can operate without user knowledge -- IF they aren't stopped by UAC. It's a good feature. It makes a lot of sense to give the unprivileged account access to/ownership of the game directory, since the updater does have to be able to update that, and also a lot of sense not to let the program run with any elevated privs that can be avoided.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitsune Knight View Post
The amount of notices a user should see should be EXTREMELY limited (with the exception of (un)installing an application, I probably see zero a month).
Except Microsoft never seems capable of doing something right on the first try. Someone in my office just got a new laptop with Windows 7 and one program triggers the UAC every single time it's launched: MICROSOFT Access.

Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ironblade View Post
Except Microsoft never seems capable of doing something right on the first try. Someone in my office just got a new laptop with Windows 7 and one program triggers the UAC every single time it's launched: MICROSOFT Access.
Not entirely surprising. Probably fixable with settings, but... Well, this is sorta normal. Used to have to exchange MS Word documents with someone occasionally, they were constantly corrupted or damaged, finally we settled on me using StarOffice and him using some Mac program, because if either of us actually used MS Word, the files were corrupted. (Even if we both used MS Word.)