With all the furor about security in Windows, there's lots of talk about how running programs with elevated user privileges often contributes to security problems. This is as much the fault of the operating system as it is the software: There are some programs that are so badly written that they can't run as anything but Administrator. That's inconvenient for users, as well as a major problem for real administrators who don't want to have things run in elevated privileges at all.

There are two reasons why RunAsLimitedUser stands out from the other solutions in this space.

• It uses an actual limited-user account. In other words, it doesn't work by deprecating rights on the account you're using, so it's a more realistic way to assess limited-user behavior.
• It is very easily deployed. Once installed, all you have to do is right-click on an application and run it from there, so it's perfect when you want to test something on the spur of the moment. ("Oh, will this work as a limited user?")