Corrine,
I have personal reasons to disable UAC, and yes I know how UAC works. As UAC as security feature, honestly... I find that statement ridiculous. See, to limit an Administrator so that it looks like a standard user is silly, putting locks and limiters and blockers and sandboxes EVERYWHERE literally, IMHO is beyond ignorant imbecile levels... The proper way to practice security is -> just lock the user, plain and simple. Security is "paid" not "given". You'd lose some flexibility when implementing proper security practice, it's a price you have to pay, and in time - you must educate your users to practice proper "secure conducts". I'd prefer to use (or forced to use) a standard user, and have my resources to be used by my applications, rather than it's used to BLOCK/CHECK/LOCK/ASK/HINDER everything I do to the system. The UAC sandbox, as efficient as MS told to customers, it's still a sandbox - meaning it does more and more checking and blocking on top of NTFS ACL/Object ACL, user token security checks, it's redundant and wasting processing power, it's horrible, just horrible...
Force Windows user to use standard user type, and only make ONE Administrator that is password protected BY DEFAULT at system install (you can optionally add another Administrator class user later, after many system checks), that is the correct way. Everything that needs a system administrator privilege will invoke a dialog box containing username/password textboxes (similar to what Linux/MacOS does). The problem here is, Windows is still using the old design, to be used as a single user, administrator friendly, -kernel/driver hooks access directly from user space applications- operating system. The usage model is still focused as old Windows is, single user...
Standard user security level is what UAC wants, so why not just use a standard user instead? The problem is, in Linux/UNIX, there is SUDO (and it's variance), that will run a process as different user, practically easy. In Windows on the other hand, "run as different user" doesn't act like SUDO, it still limited in some ways, and isn't as predictable -limited by how Windows is designed-, again back to the "design" problem.
But then again, there's few hundred millions Windows users that will get cranky when their beloved OS changed drastically by Microsoft, yes I understand this factor. But let's look at other OS vendor, let's say Apple. They drastically change the way their OS work when they announce that Mac OS X is coming. They again change drastically as killing PowerPC support in 10.6, they kill classic (OS 9 virtualization layer) in OSX (I forgot the exact version). For the sake of progress, some legacy MUST GO, it has to. Microsoft in this sense is the slowest of them all, Linux is even crazier than Apple, the software stack is changing in daily basis, kernel gets upgraded by the hour, and yet - the most complaint prone market in the world, the corporate users, are sitting happily with their Linux servers...
So, IMHO, UAC is useless, a technological mess orchestrated beautifully by Microsoft engineers, disable it if you know what you're doing, by that I mean that you'll use the standard user account instead for day to day use plus a dose of common sense, and an updated AV/malware scanner, and fast user switch to admin account to do admin works...
zzz2496
