Have you recently installed a system utility or a productivity application such as Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Dreamweaver and have been bombarded with registration messages that pop-up every time your start the application? Even when you check the box and tell the application never to remind you ever again?
This happens to me all the time and is very annoying. The culprit of this problem is... you guessed it, UAC!
Your application keeps asking you to register because the registry key that it checks to see if you should still be harassed into registration is never getting set thanks to UAC. When I check the box or hit the Never remind me again button the registry write gets virtualized because the app tried to write to a part of the registry a standard user does not have access to. This is a feature of UAC and it does a great job of redirecting the registry write so the application does not crash out. However, since the application is not aware of this virtualized write location it keeps checking the registry value of the key in the normal location. Since the application has read only access to that location the key will keep getting virtualized every time you check the box and is why the registration boxes keep popping up.
How do you get out of this mess? Real simple, just run the application as an Administrator. This time UAC will not be in the way and the app will be able to write the never annoy me ever again with this stupid registration box key setting.
This simple trick will also work for some applications that pop up other information and do not respect the stop annoying me again option.
