Problems if not administrator

Hi all,

Thanks for this great program, but unfortunately it's not running smoothly for me.

I'm running latest version (3.317) on Windows 7 Home Premium.

If I run the program as an administrator it works fine, but I'd like my housemates to be able to use the program from a guest account without adminstrator rights. There are numerous permission errors when trying to run as a non-admin, most notably inability to open movies by double clicking, because the user doesn't have permission to create the "temp.m3u" file in the Programs (x86) directory.

I don't understand why this program is set up to have all the Settings files in the Program directory. Why not in user application data folder, like most programs?

I tried to have the program sitting outside the Program directory, but then I get errors where the program is looking for xml files in the Program directory.

In the process of writing this post I've discovered that keeping my original copy of MC in the Program directory (including the Settings folder) but running another copy of MC in another folder (including a copy of the same Settings folder) works for both admin and non-admin. Only problem now is that the program won't close for non-admins - CPU usage goes up to 50% and the process has to be killed in Task Manager.

Surely all these problems could be solved by keeping the settings in a user application data folder instead of the program folder?!

The paths to the various xmls are stored in the \settings\profile.xml

If you extract MC to c:\Media Companion\ when MC is first run, it should create the necessary empty config files as subfolders of the MC install.

All users should then be able to run the program as that folder doesn't have UAC (User Access Control) stopping the creation of files there.

A few found this solution from this thread... https://billyad2000.darkbb.com/bug-discussion-f3/win-7-64bit-error-t1137.htm

MC was first created on XP & it has also been discussed do we want it to be a 'portable' program or an installed one...

Vista & Win7 have been making it more difficult (safer?) to run portable programs in the program file directory with local config files as you could do in XP.

Cheers

For a while, MC 2.xxx actually was using the appropriate app data folders to store all data, it seemed to generate a lot of negative feedback.

In the end I ended up compromising and added a feature that allowed people to force MC to store settings in the same folder as the prog.
https://billyad2000.darkbb.com/announcements-f1/new-version-2229-t455.htm

Since I got no postitve feedback at all when using the app data folders it was dropped from gen2.

Billy, it might be time to return to this Vista/Win7 issue. I suspect it will also mean that MC may need an installer to determine its OS before install. Win 7 is much better than Vista, I suspect that most people like myself when they upgrade now will use win 7 rather than loading XP on their Vista machines....

The main reason I liked the config files in with MC was that they where easily located & you could get into them to see what data MC was working with to locate issues. Moving the files to the Data folders makes this more difficult, however perhaps a button in MC that would open explorer at the config files would alleviate that issue.

Cheers