why don't I have access to anything?

Hey Pebbly -

If I had known about the elevated Administrator earlier, (and that Administrator was castrated) I would have jumped all over it. But now I feel that I don't know enough about how things work and should try to get a better grasp on things.
I'm going to try to get accustomed to working out of specific directories and see if that is tolerable. As I said in an earlier message, my C: drive is almost entirely devoted to Windows and program files. That makes it easier to keep protections up but I don't know if I'll be constantly moving things from "My" areas on the C: drive to my data disks.

The one thing I'm unsure of is whether Elevated Administrator disables Protected Mode in Internet Explorer. A dfast look at the documentation here tells me that turning off UAC would disable it, but Elevated may just bypass UAC and not turn it off. I'll have to read that more carefully. I rarely use IE but there are some things that insist on it and once I'm in there it's easy to wander off into the wider web.

It looks as though my old methods are going away. I might be able to beat Windows7 now, but 8 and 9 are still looming and eventually I'll have to surrender. Maybe by the time I'm ready to move again, Google will have an operating system to jump to. I'll really miss XP though. It turned out to be almost everything I hope Win3.1 would become. I had to put a Classic skin on Win7 and there's no way in hell I'm going for Metro. I still need a Desktop more than Mobile.

I used Security Essentials on XP and liked it. I was under the impression that it wasn't available on Win7. Whatever security box popped up when I installed told me that I had no anti-virus and made no mention of MSE.

I also have Windows Defender which is turned off and I have no idea what it is. It didn't turn on and was never mentioned, I only discovered it later while exploring. Microsoft's own pages highlight prevention of spyware over anti-virus. Most companies tie that in with anti-virus so it would seem that Defender and Security Essentials overlap. That's confusing to me and other consumers.

I'm now using AVG Free as my anti-virus. It seems to be working well but has lousy internal navigation. I'm using SpywareBlaster for spyware. I don't recall that program doing anything visible in ten years, but I trust it anyway.

VistaKing hasn't replied to my request for clarification of his cryptic demands, so I don't know what the state of this thread is. I think I'm in a better place although I'm still running into occasional privilege issues that I'd like to have explained. Keep an eye out for updates to this thread. I'll mark it solved in a week if I don't see further responses and feel that I'm out of the woods.