Now that I've actually had to try and work with it, I have to say that Vista is certainly the most annoying operating system I've ever had to deal with. Especially if you ever have to (gak) edit system configuration files or something like that.

Somebody wishes to change a system file. Is that OK with you? Well, yeah, that would be me that's doing it you dumbass. I'm sorry, but you don't have the requisite privilege to tweak that file. Would you like me to give you the necessary privilege? Well, yeah that would be nice. Somebody on the system is trying to elevate their privilege. Is this OK? That would be me again, dumbass. Somebody is trying to change a system file. Is this OK? Didn't you already ask me this? Oh but now I'm somebody else so you have to ask again. And then finally I get to edit the file. When I finish, it's another round of idiocy. Somebody just changed a system file, is this OK? (Sigh...) 

I remember Apple had a pretty funny commercial about this recently, but it's the first time I've had to deal with it firsthand. But once again it shows how completely full of holes this system is. This is all to prevent bad guys from doing bad things to your machine.

But they put the 'triggers' in the wrong place - when the questionable action is being done. You wouldn't need to ask these questions if instead you were to trigger on the source of the action, how is it being invoked? Who is doing this? If a script that got downloaded from a web page wants to mess with system files, you should definitely ask what the heck is going on. But if the source of this was somebody sitting at the keyboard clicking on a file, this isn't something you need to verify. And if it is, the machine owner has more serious problems than viruses. But then if you could trigger on the source of the action, it wouldn't be all that hard to prevent it from happening at all, now would it?

Somebody named 'mike' is about to save a blog post. Is this OK.... mike?