Due to design changes in PCPE 3.0 (like display of balloon notifications for software updates, configuring of cost per unit power, turn on devices immediately), systray accesses/modifies registry hives to display notifications. Because of this, UAC requests permission/user intervention upon login. With the older PCPE 2.2, APC Systray was not accessing (or modifying) Windows registry hive specific to PowerChute Personal Edition and that is why UAC did not request permissions.
To support registry access/modification, any windows exe requires elevation. Windows, before elevating any executable, checks if it is accompanied with a manifest file. If yes, based on the security policy on the specific system, the UAC prompt appears. If there is no elevation (no manifest file), then for that user a separate virtual store (Registry Virtualization) of registry entries will be created.
Since only one set of entries needs to be maintained for data integrity, PCPE 3.0 design has been done by embedding a manifest file so as to avoid creation of virtual store when the application is run in admin/non-admin credentials.
The question as to why you are getting the UAC pop up even though you have logged in as administrators on Vista and Win 7, is due to Microsoft security measures. Though you have administration privileges, you still do not have 100% privileges because of UAC.
As a work around, if the prompting for user consent is annoying for those logged in as an administrator, you can change the UAC behavior by altering the security policy in Windows. However, this work around goes with aDISCLAIMER that Windows will no longer prompt the UAC window for any application which needs to be elevated when the user is logged in as administrator and APC / Schneider Electric does not recommend making this change.
The change in security policy can be attained using the following steps (note: the UAC is still enabled, but more privilege is given to admin):
1. Start -> Run
2. Type secpol.msc and hit enter. Local Security Policy window appears.
3. on the left navigation panel, click on local policies -> Security Options.
4. On the right panel, scroll below until you see "User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in admin approval mode".
5. Double click this option which opens a window. Navigate to Local security setting tab, select "Elevate Without prompting" from the drop down and apply the changes.
Once the setting is committed, restart the system and you no more see the prompting if the logged on user is administrator.
The other option is the stop UAC all together. This option is also not recommended by APC / Schneider Electric.
