Does Power user to install software works fine ?

[Marlon Brown]

This is a public organization (3,500WinXPs) and I must allow users to
install software. Currently users are local administratrors and I could
downgrade them to power users to block certain capabilities such as
installing hotfixes without authorization or disjoin machine from the
domain.

Question here is this:
Does power users are really able to perform application installations just
fine ? I know that works in theory but I would like to double check to make
sure.

 

[Colin Nash [MVP]]

The answer is "sometimes they can install software, but not always"

The issue is really the registry keys and folders that they have access to
write to. And on top of that, some setup programs do a check at the
beginning and only allow members of the "Administrators" group to proceed...
even if a Power User had the sufficient privileges for it to succeed.

You can see Registry permissions in REGEDIT under XP. Basically, Power
Users can create and modify values under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE and
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT -- which is something that regular users cannot do.