User Account Control: Virtualize file and registry write failures to per-user locations

User Account Control: Virtualizes file and registry write failures to per-user locations

This security setting enables the redirection of legacy application write failures to defined locations in both the registry and file system. This feature mitigates those applications that historically ran as administrator and wrote runtime application data back to either %ProgramFiles%, %Windir%; %Windir%\system32 or HKLM\Software\....

Virtualization facilitates the running of pre-Vista (legacy) applications that historically failed to run as Standard User. An administrator running only Windows Vista compliant applications may choose to disable this feature as it is unnecessary.

The options are:

- Enabled: Facilitates the runtime redirection of application write failures to defined user locations for both the file system and registry.

- Disabled: Applications that write data to protected locations will simply fail as they did in previous versions of Windows.

Default : Enabled

Policy path: 

Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Local Policies\Security Options

Supported on: 

At least Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008

Registry settings: 

SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\EnableVirtualization

Reboot required: 

No

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