Video Games Forum - Free Online Arcade and Gaming Forum - View Single Post - Administrator-Only Games on Windows XP

The Big Nerd · #1 (**permalink**) 01-01-2003, 12:26 AM

Is anyone else as frustrated as I am about the fact that many Windows games will only run on Administrator accounts on Windows XP Professional? This seems to me to make impossible what I would imagine is a fairly common scenario: a single PC that takes advantage of XP security to set up some "adult" accounts with Administrator privileges, and some "kid" or "family" accounts without. The fact that many games will not run on User accounts means that anyone wanting to play one of these games on a shared machine at home needs full control over the machine. So having a secure family machine that the kids can use to play games is not a possibility!
Here, BTW, is Microsoft support's accurate though not really helpful generic response to this issue. Not news, but, for what it's worth:

Let me explain you the situation. All these games that use DirectX resources, use a particular set of routines that generate calls which in turn generate system calls or instructions to various system resources or requesting for certain resources form Windows that may only be allotted for administrative accounts and not for limited account. This entire hierarchy of system calls is also dependant on the drivers for various resources like CD drivers, video card drivers or sound card drivers in use. There the calls may be channeled in a way that may not violate the security model for Windows and this is the reason that on certain systems the games may function perfectly fine even for the Limited User accounts.

In this case, since we are having issues, this surely implies that the calls are violating the security model that is causing the games to fail under Limited User account.

Windows XP is based on NT kernel and thus inherits the features of a secure Operating system.

Operating systems like Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows Me, though they had the concept of users, account information merely had the details like wallpaper, screensaver, themes, etc. They did not have anything like user rights or privileges. They did not contain any information on user credentials.

User accounts in Windows XP, on the other hand, have user rights and privileges assigned to them. Users have a set of credentials. Not all users can perform any thing on the system as it was possible in the versions of Windows I have mentioned above.

I am so sorry that I can not offer a workaround to the situation.

Note that there is in fact a workaround: setting up an admin account for that users with non-admin accounts can use with the "Run As..." feature of Windows XP. This isn't a perfect solution, of course, because the non-admins will need to know the password to that account and could thus do some damage if they wanted to; but XP makes it hard to get access to dangerous applications from within a non-admin account, and there are simple ways to remove the account from the start up screen so non-admins can't use it to actually log on. Still, this all seems like more work than the average gamer should have to go through: The game box ought to indicate when a game demands an admin account in order to run ... shouldn't it?