All MS Office Pro features work with Admin but not with admin user

[accordeoniste]

For a long time I've had much difficulty understanding the exact difference between the computer administrator and a user whose type is administrator. On my system there are two administrators - one known as "Administrator" and another with my name, Gary or Gary and Susan. Each administrator has their own profile. I used Windows 7 Professional.

The distinction doesn't matter to system operation in general. With MS Office Professional, however, it does. When I start MS Word or MS Excel as myself, for example, it won't let me access the help files. When I try to, a message states "There is a problem with one or more installed help files. Please repair your office installation and try again." I ran the repair program successfully, but as myself I can't access the help files. When I log in as user "administrator", I can but the access is limited. I can also access all features of the program in safe mode. Yet when I log in as myself I can only access the help files if I run the program as an administrator. This perplexes me because my user type is administrator. This problem has occurred with other programs from time to time.

Would someone please help me understand this, and is there a workaround? I can set the privilege level to administrator which will permit me unrestricted access to the help files, but then a dialog box appears every time I start the program, which I'd prefer to not see.

 

[Ranger4]

Read through this Forum tutorial to see if it helps you set up your Admin accounts properly. It does seem that there is something wrong with your account accessibility. Do you need to prevent others from accessing your MS Office files?. If not then you could reduce the security you currently have. Anyway read through the tutorial & get back if you have further problems.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/103538-user-account-type-change.html

 

[accordeoniste]

Following your advice I read a tutorial on the built-in administrator account vs. an unelevated admin account on this Forum and it was very helpful. Reading the tutorial prompted me to modify my user accounts: I removed my self-created admin account and replaced it with the built-in admin account. I also temporarily changed my own admin user account type to that of a standard user. However, doing that couldn't help me answer questions such as these:

1) why did the unelevated admin user (myself) and the self-created but unelevated admin user have different access to the MS Office help files? Each could view them, but the help file information I had access to was organized by category, whereas the self-created admin had to submit a query to obtain the same information.

2) why can I not run programs such as resource monitor as a standard user? I tried doing this with the "Run as administrator" option, and it didn't work. Since I prefer to have access to this program while in my user account, I changed my user type back to admin.

To clarify my user accnt. structure, this is what it was yesterday:

Myself aka Gary as administrator, then limited user, then administrator
Self-created administrator
Limited user

This is what it became today:

Myself as administrator
Built-in administrator
Limited user

I think the new structure is an improvement over the old one. I'd much appreciate your comments and suggestions, and if you can answer my questions above.

 

[Ranger4]

I really can't answer your questions as to why certain user rights work & some don't, but I imagine it's probably to do with security, as Windows 7 is designed for home use as well as full business use, where a lot more security might be required.

I run my computer as Administrator, but it asks me for permission to install new programs or open some programs, which is a security feature.

Obviously in a business environment you would not want ordinary users changing things without permission on the computer, so a lot of things are blocked for ordinary users, but an Administrator has rights to be able to change things, which as you can see would be needed.

Open User Accounts & select the particular User Account & on the list of options select the one that says "Change User Account Control Settings". When that opens you can select the security settings you want. On mine as Administrator it is set at the Default setting.