Windows 7 to tone down UAC

"We've heard loud and clear that you are frustrated," says Microsoft engineer Ben Fathi, in a posting on the Windows 7 engineering blog. "You find the prompts too frequent, annoying, and confusing. We still want to provide you control over what changes can happen to your system, but we want to provide you a better overall experience."

According to Fathi, when Vista first launched, 775,312 unique applications were producing prompts, mainly because "much of the software ecosystem unnecessarily required admin privileges to run."

This, he claims, has fallen to 168,149 as developers have adapted to Vista's new requirements. He also argues that number of sessions marred by one or more UAC prompts has declined from 50% to 33%.