9 out of 10 monkeys believe they are not behind glass

Try this weirdness on for size.

I was troubleshooting a bad application install on my Vista x64 box here at work a couple weeks ago, made a couple application-related registry deletions. Nothing major.

And UAC re-enabled itself. I started getting prompts for application use, scripts, etc.

The weird part?

Going into the User Accounts Control Panel applet, and UAC was deselected. Vista was saying that it was disabled, yet I was still getting prompts. I would select it, reboot, check and it was back to deselected. It was stuck on, yet the control panel was stuck with box unchecked (meaning it should have been off). No GPO for Vista on my domain, no overriding apps.

WTF?

So I ran msconfig, clicked the Tools tab, and launched the Disable UAC script. Rebooted.

Fixed.

Weird. Weird. Weird.

And I checked the registry after the boot (I should have checked it prior to see if the value was different), but after the reboot, the registry confirmed it was truly disabled.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\EnableLUA == 0 (disabled).

Another day, another Microsoft bug.