Windows Vista Beta2 users to run as standard user

David Cross a Director of Program Management with Windows Security has posted today over at the UAC blog that the users accounts created on Windows Vista Beta2 will be standard users.  Yep, thats right...not an Admin, not a Protected Admin, but a standard user. 

I think this is a great move by the Windows Security team.  It will hieghten awareness of the challenges of running as a standard user since the Beta2 build will be a widely distributed build and the one that most software vendors will target many of their early products at. 

So, if you are an ISV, pay attention to this and make sure that your code can run as a standard users as many users will be running this way. I hope. 

It isn't clear from the post if this will be the deafult for accounts created during setup, I have posed that question to them and will add it here when I get an answer.

Couple of things to watch for....

   Don't have a "Self-Update" that is wanting to put things in program files or other areas that a standard user doesn't have rights too.  This won't work and unfortunatly lots of software does this these days.

   Don't  write to the Local Machine registry for state information, yep it won't work....

   Don't access files and registry with more rights than you need. This is just common sense.

Way to go UAC Team, this shows me a serious commitment from Microsoft on helping control the malware problem the Windows community faces.

Will you be able to run as a standard user or will you quickly add yourself to the administrator group?  If so, why?

UPDATE: A PM with UAC confirmed that the default account created by setup will be an admin.