Is this Official?

[Wolfboi]

By which I mean, is this the official place where developers and official maintainers of Vortex will answer your questions? I ask because I've been waiting three days for an answer in a thread I admittedly hijacked and I've yet to hear a single suggestion about how to resolve my issue.

 

To reiterate, I downloaded the one step Vortex installer several days ago. I'm using Windows 7 and I have a single account on my pc. Because there's only one account, it is an admin account by default. However, I'm not right clicking on the .exe and choosing 'run as administrator', I'm simply double clicking to open. I've also tried right clicking and choosing just 'open'. Both generate the same result, which is that I get the standard UAC warning, 'Do you want to run this file?'. When I say run, it begins to install. The install window bar completes, the Vortex logo appears, and then I get the warning above. The error window is entitled 'Admin Rights Detected' and the text below says 'Vortex is not meant to be run as administrator, if you're doing it because you're having permission issues, please stop, you're just making it worse,' etc, etc. I then have the options to quit, or ignore the warning.

 

After quitting, Vortex now appears to be installed anyway, as I have a link on my desktop, which, when opened, causes the Vortex logo to appear on the screen, instantly followed by 'Admin Rights Detected' popup warning. So what do I do? What will be the result of my ignoring the warning? The warning which states very clearly that if I do ignore it, I shouldn't come crying to you guys that I'm having issues. What steps do I have to take to resolve this issue?

[Tannin42]

This is the official place, that doesn't mean you can expect an official reply to every message, this is free software after all.

Especially when you hijack other threads - or when the question you asked was answered repeatedly.

 

Ok, but to the point: The UAC dialog on installing the software is normal, you should get that for every software you install on windows that is installed for all users instead of just for the active user.

The "Admin Rights Detected" dialog means that your user account has rights that a regular, default windows account shouldn't have.

Vortex can't actually (reliably) figure out which elevation level it's run with, instead it runs an operation (with no effect) that regular windows accounts can't run and sees if it reports the expected permission error.

In your case it doesn't which is definitive proof that your account is not a default windows account. I don't know what was changed, there are way too many ways to screw up the windows permissions so there is no way for me to provide a guide to fix it - all I know is that Vortex is being run with rights it shouldn't have and makes you aware of that.

 

If you really started Vortex in the same way you start every application and you feel safe running software with non-default permissions, by all means, go ahead, you've already been running everything else with elevated permissions anyway.

The dialog is just informing you. It does have a continue button, it won't (shouldn't) show up a second time if you continue and it's just saying "if you're doing it because you're having permission issues, please stop".

 

The point of the dialog is: The largest part of bug reports we get are from users who do run NMM/MO/Wrye Bash/Vortex explicitly as admin, causing those tools to create files that are write protected for the regular user account and later they run another tool with regular account and wonder why they get permission errors and report those to us.

The dialog is an attempt to educate users that running software as admin is not a solution and can cause problems later on, problems we can't fix in software because the whole point of permissions is that an un-elevated process can't circumvent them.

It's not meant to indicate that Vortex is in any way more "dangerous" than other software.

[Wolfboi]

Thank you so much for the answer. I knew the UAC was normal, and only mentioned it so that you would know it was on and working properly. I couldn't begin to say where my admin rights have been changed along the way, if indeed they have. I just assumed that using a single account meant I had admin rights when I needed them, thus the option to right click on a program or file and select 'open as admin'. I very much look forward to getting started with Vortex.