Indexer and WinXP Limited User Accounts

[Rick Parsons]

Zoom Indexer doesn't seem to support WinXP when the latter is configured with "Limited User Accounts" (the config recommended by MS.)

The main problem is that it writes zoom.ini regularly and this is located in \Program Files. An LUA does not have write authority to this folder. The file should be located per user in something like \Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Zoom\ and I think that the start of this path can be obtained from the registry.

The program also attempts to write Zoom.zcfg and \statistics there as well but at least it is possible to override these. A default starting point for these should probably be My Documents.

This is not a big deal as at least it doesn't abort (unlike some other software) but is an irritation.

[Ray]

Yes, that's a valid point and we'll be looking at switching over to the "Documents and Settings" folders for default and temporary files in a future version.

Note that the policies for a Limited User account varies depending on the security configuration of a Windows XP installation. ZoomIndexer will currently run under a Limited User account in XP, but there are issues with some security policies which restrict write access to the Program Files folder, which is necessary for some features. Other access restrictions in Windows can also hinder features such as scheduling, by preventing non-administrator users from changing scheduled tasks.

[Rick Parsons]

Thanks for that Ray. I will look forward to it.

With XP Home (a required config for at least one machine in any dev lab) you don't get a lot of choice about the security settings. The only real variation is if you have NTFS (with file protection) or FAT32 (without). You can hack individual folder permissions with some difficulty and, for a few s/w products I have had to, but it is not something for Joe Public.