If you have an interactive user program that needs admin permissions to run, it will not do so on startup. Instead, an icon appears in the notification area (system tray) which lets you see (and optionally start) such programs manually where you can then acknowledge the UAC prompt required to kick it off.

View image

It is a bit of a pain, but the alternative would be to present you with a UAC prompt every time you logged into the computer, and that would be much more painful. Particularly as so many people seem to hate this feature already.

It could be the program does not really need admin permissions to run, but is requiring it as a matter of sloppy programming. Okay that could be harsh, it was not such a big deal to “attempt” an action as administrator before Vista. The point being, if you have an application doing this to you, see the vendor’s website for updates as there are things that can be done programmatically to avoid this situation and with any luck the vendor has released a “more” Vista compatible release that avoids this situation.