Can no longer install without doing "Run As Admin"..

I recently noticed that everytime I want to install something on my Windows 7 Ultimate, I have to right-click and do Run As Administrator. Its a pain to have to do so everytime, so I would love to be able to enable permissions properly to what they somehow were before.

I ran a full virus scan + Malaware and all is clean.

There is only ONE account on this PC, and its the administrator account I created for myself when I installed Windows.

I read in other posts things about hidden administrators or taking ownership but I'm afraid to mess things up... I was running smoothly for years and now all of a sudden, I have to manually Run as Administrator every installer.

Can someone please assist?

when you try to install normally, do you get any error message? Or just does not do anything at all? How recentely you think this issue started to happen? I mean like a week or a month ago?

Thanks for the inital replies. :)

OK here is more specific message:

"Unable to execute file in the temporary directory. Setup Aborted. Error 5: Access Denied."

In this case I was trying to install a program from a virtual (mounted) drive. But I've also gotten this message when trying to run a setup program off a local hard drive.

My only way around is "Run As Administrator..." but I dont want to have to do this everytime. It wasnt like this before...I am the only user on this machine, so one account, and its Administrator. I think my permissions need to be changed somewhere... I recently merged and adjusted partitions so maybe something got screwed up then.

Anyway, can someone please help me step by step?

OK, I created a 2nd Administrator account as suggested. I then restarted the computer and logged in with this new admin account. Success! This account was able to launch the installer program successfully (no Access Denied popup, as previously described).

So whats next? Do I need to delete the original admin account and lose all my personalization and preferences? Or does this provide insight on how I can just simply "fix" the 1st admin account? Id rather not have to lose all my preferences...obviously.

Let me know..

Restoring an image is too risky in my case. I've been installing lots of stuff and dont remember a definitive date when all of a sudden I was needing to install things as an administrator.

Can you walk me thru the process of copying my data to the new account and deleting the faulty one?

Do you not think its just a matter of going into the various hard drive's properties and adjusting security settings and user permissions (rather than copying to the new account and deleting the old)?

Thanks for the options. I tried Microsoft's preferred method... I created a total of 3 user accounts (all admins) so that I could perform as the 3rd account the copy and paste from account 1 to account 2.

Although account #2 when tested still worked for installing programs w/o requiring the Run As Administrator, I'm not really liking the fact that I lost most of my customizations of Account 1, such as:

Wallpaper, Desktop background and widgets, programs pinnned to taskbar at the bottom. In addition I had assigned icons representing my different hard drives. All gone back to the default generic versions. And my Libraries where I use to have music selections, video selections, etc...they're all now empty.

So Im not sure what exactly got copied over but all the visual tweaks and organizations I had done did not copy over, so I'm not really any further. Not sure which direction to go now? Keep the original account but just always do Run As Administrator everytime? Or persist and make my new account match perfectly my original account?