If you’re interested in removing admin rights from your users but you have some apps that don’t run well without admin rights you might be interested in my current employer’s solution, Privilege Guard. It lets you assign admin rights to specific applications rather than a whole user account, and is designed to solve exactly the problem you are facing.

Before I started working for Avecto I found myself in a number of similar situations where I had to look after badly behaving apps but also desired to remove admin rights from my users. I ended up messing around with registry and file permissions and doing all sorts of other gross hacks. If I’d known at the time about Privilege Guard, it would have saved me many tens of hours of effort (and probably a few hairs too!).

I hope you don’t think this is spam, and I apologise if you do: however I thought Privilege Guard might be genuinely useful for you. Let me know if you’d like to see a demo or if you’d like an evaluation copy.

Cheers,
James
james.young@avecto.com