Hi, I'd like to report a bug and some thoughts on how it could be addressed.
Today I reinstalled my machine which is running Windows 8.1 Pro and I setup two accounts: one with administrative privileges and a standard one which will be the one I'll use on a daily basis.
If CCleaner bypasses UAC there's no warning about the user not having administrator rights, which in turn causes uninstallation of programs impossible with an error dialog popping up if the user tries to uninstall something.
Thinking about it... I see two one ways to deal with this:
- Change CCleaner's manifest to require administrator rights to be run. As of now it's set to "asInvoker", setting it to "requireAdministrator" would effectively ask for admin rights when opening the application. I don't really like this option, but it is one way nonetheless.
- Leaving things as they are, but checking if the user has actually administrative rights when trying to do things that would require them (you could use the Windows function CheckTokenMembership() for that). This one seems like a good idea to me, for example if the user were not an administrator you could notify him/her with a dialog when entering the "Uninstall" section, asking if he/she'd like to launch CCleaner with admin privileges, elevating itself (i.e. relaunching through UAC authenticated as an admin user).
In any case... a warning should be displayed or the user notified that uninstallation of applications would be impossible if CCleaner is running without administrative privileges.
EDIT:
After more thoughts... since elevation in this case would cause the program to be run under a different user, cleaning personal stuff (of the unprivileged user) would require knowing which user ran CCleaner in the first place. That's something to take into account if the application is relaunched elevated.
"requireAdministrator" would complicate things even further, knowing the user would be more convoluted.
