Inkscape at the end of the installation starts with elevated privileges admin preferences

Please provide information about your version of Windows (presumably - you don't mention your OS at all ;) ), and which Inkscape version (file name of the installer).

I have added the OS and Inkscape version to the description. Please excuse me for forgetting it.

could you define how come this is undesirable?

Naturally, one would want to configure Inkscape at this first start, but the preferences belong to the admin account, and when we start it afterwards, it is necessary to do this initial configuration again. Also, the documents go to the folder of the admin account (even if we choose save to libraries/images), so we cannot access them when start Inkscape normally.

I am not sure I understand. I am new to Windows 7, but here is my experience so far:

- Windows 7 Home Premium
- Inkscape 0.48.2 installed from the file : Inkscape-0.48.2-1-win32.exe
- installation directory : C:\Program Files\Inkscape\
- Inkscape preferences in : C:\Users\Alvin\AppData\Roaming\inkscape\preferences.xml

- if I wish to save a file to a system directory such as C:\Program Files\Inkscape\ then I need to perform a right click on Inkscape and choose 'Run as Administrator'.
- if I wish to save a file to a common directory such as C:\Windows\Temp\ then do a normal double click on Inkscape.

- so far this is working for me, is this different than what you are getting?
- note that the preferences are in your own user directory, and also if you do not run Inkscape as adminstrator then your data may get saved to a location like C:\Users\Alvin\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Inkscape if you do not have appropriate authority. But I think this is normal Windows 7 behaviour, as far as I can tell.

also, if there is an option during installation that says "Install for All users", could you try not choosing this option?

This is an interesting notion which hadn't occurred to me and is definitely a problem; when installed from a non-admin accoutn (so that it is running in a different user account, rather than just elevated privileges through UAC) the preferences (%APPDATA%\inkscape) will go in the administrator user profile rather than the current user profile.

Unfortunately it would require a bit of re-engineering in places (which I should still do...) to switch to the UAC plugin which might be able to be used to fix it (not sure if can be used with the finish page run; I'd need to research further).

The simple solution is to remove the option of running Inkscape immediately after installation by removing this line from packaging/win32/inkscape.nsi:

    !define MUI_FINISHPAGE_RUN "$INSTDIR\inkscape.exe"

This seems to me to be the wise solution. There's nothing wrong with it, either. People can start it from the start menu or some other way. They will every other time...

so now I am officially confused, not knowing anything about security.
How come the initial reporter has his preferences in a admin directory, while I have mine in my own user directory (which happily is what I want)?

Obviously, my description was not clear enough and next time I will try to make it better. The situation is exactly as Chris Morgan outlined.

If you get the preferences in your directory, this means that you are using one account for the administration and for the normal use, and when elevation of privileges is required, this is done with UAC but for the same account.

The problem I am describing appears when we have an extra account for administration, it is different from the account we are using for the normal operation. The normal "user" account cannot elevate its privileges. So, when the installer requires elevated privileges, it is actually run under this separate admin account with all its associated folders (%APPDATA% expands differently). Hence the preferences are stored in this extra account. When we run Inkscape normally, the preferences accessed from the directory of this normal user account.

okay, thanks for the explanation, I see that the situation is a lot more complicated than I realized...