In XP, you could always change permission without logging off, by using the runas command or Run as... in the context menu. I think you could also set shortcuts to run programs as Administrator.<p>So you could run as a non privileged users, and you&#x27;d only need to log in as Administrator for some very specific tasks.<p>However, there were many applications that didn&#x27;t play nice with that model and required you to run as Administrator. By changing the default, MS had to do a big push to make software makers abide by the rules (which had been in place since XP (edit: in the mainstream branch) but were often ignored)