If you use Foxit Reader, an excellent lightweight PDF file viewer from Foxit Software, then this tip might be of value to you sometime. I’ve been using the software for years as an alternative to Adobe’s bloated offering. It has always worked well for me, and continued to work well after I migrated my home office to Windows Vista. However, I recently installed an update to version 3.0.1301 of the program, and suddenly found that every time I tried to open a PDF Vista’s User Account Control kicked in and requested elevation. It was annoying. If this happens to you, here’s how to make it go away.
The reader program is located in c:\Program Files\Foxit Software\Foxit Reader\. The file is called Foxit Reader.exe. Navigate to this folder in Windows Explorer, and right click the filename. On the context menu that appears click “Properties,” and then click the “Compatibility” tab in the dialog. First, look at the bottom and see if “Run this program as an administrator” is checked. If it is, uncheck it. That might be the whole problem for you, but in my case the checkbox was clear, and I was still getting UAC prompts from Vista. The next thing to do is click the button at the bottom of the dialog labeled “Show settings for all users.” This brings up another dialog. Look for the same checkbox in that dialog and clear it if it’s checked. Click “ok” to accept the two open dialogs. Foxit should now launch without requesting elevation.