Originally Posted By: tfabris
Recently, Windows has had this thing called "UAC" which prevents programs from running as an administrator unless you tell it otherwise. So they added that advanced shortcut property setting I talked about, to allow you to create a shortcut that defaults to running as administrator. So far so good.

But one of my pet peeves is that they fucked it up. Now, when you create a shortcut that runs as administrator, it fucks up the working directory. No matter what you set for the working directory in the shortcut properties, the working directory always gets changed to the Windows System folder if you've ticked the "administrator" tickybox. It's been this way ever since Windows Vista I think.

So now everyone's batch files has to CD at the beginning of the batch file when they didn't need to before. I have no idea how something so egregious, something that immediately breaks everybody's batch files, didn't get repaired right away, and even persisted through four major OS releases. Sigh.

I'm trying to remember a good explanation of the situation, and why it's likely to never be "fixed" in the way you want. After close to 10 years of UAC, it seems clear Microsoft doesn't intend to modernize DOS concepts in the security model they adopted to protect the OS. Users of Microsoft products got used to them adding amazing level of complexity to the product to stay backwards compatible with concepts from the single user PC era of the 80s. That complexity blew up in Microsoft's face during initial NT development, again during Longhorn development, and lastly during Windows 9 development. It's becoming clear their idea of legacy support now is to containerize and virtualize it.

The sooner companies adopt the practices laid out in Windows 10 for legacy apps, the sooner the Windows platform can become even more competitive in the landscape today. Overall as someone who dislikes monopolies, the new Microsoft continues to impress me for providing some solid competition again.