In an effort to secure my home computers, I have been setting up accounts for my kids on both of them. Very easy. They get to play around with their favourite screensavers and wallpaper settings and so on. And I’m making them regular “users”, not “power users”, so they can’t “accidentally” install anything they find on the Web into the Windows directory or Program Files. (The school computers are riddled with stuff found from some super-dooper smilies and “mini games” web sites).

It’s times like these that you begin to understand why it’s so handy to have the Documents And Settings directories and the Registry, which have areas writable by all users. And you also begin to wonder why some software writers (including Microsoft) ignore them.

Example 1: Midtown Madness 2 (which my son Jeremy loves) needs write access to its own directory, for storing player data and some other guff. Easily fixed, but WHY?

Example 2: the DVD player software that came with one of the computers obviously wants to do something in one of the verboten directories and gracefully crashes and burns when it’s not run as Administrator. Haven’t had time to sort out why, exactly, yet. Must upgrade to PowerDVD — I wonder if it does that.

This is pretty basic stuff. Software authors really should know better.