Only administrator can play games on my xp pro. Any fix?

I just upgraded my machine to windows xp pro sp2. I was hoping that my kids would be able to access their game progams as a super user and I could maintain some security on my machine. It didn't work that way. Is there any way to allow super users to access these programs? The programs sites simply tell me that users have to be administrators to run the program.

 

Unfortunately not, if that's what the sites are telling you. It's not good programming though, to force people to run as Administrators all the time. One thing that you can try is to try and find which Registry keys the games are trying to access (in HK_Local_Machine). You can sometimes get a program to run by granting read write permissions to the keys in there for limited users or power users. This will tell you what Registry keys are being modified (be aware this sort of thing is hard work, with no guarantee of success):

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/regmon.shtml

 

as sparky said.. I remember attending a security lecture on ms campus.. the guy was frothing at the mouth "why do i have to make my 5 year old daughter an administrator to play barbies makeup-dressup playhouse ".

SP2 was the first step in 'encouraging' software vendors to start paying attention to permissions, but its going to be longhorn timeframe before you see any real progress in this area.

 

Thanks

Thank you for the replies. At least I understand the problem better than before. I really appreciate your time.

 

Perhaps I have got two different issues confused....but I thought there was an option to "run program as" and specify your administrator account.