Need an Admin logon to play

BillyYank

I bought all three games from Good Old Games and installed them with Galaxy. BGII and IWD work fine, but Baldur's Gate makes me log in as an admin to play it. This is on Windows 8.1 Pro and I also tested on Windows 7. I'm running the latest version (1.3.2053). It's installed under C:\GOG Games\ and not C:\Program Files (86)\.

(BTW, please don't give me the cop-out answer of "login as the Admin account", if I wanted to do that, I wouldn't be asking the question.)

Gallowglass

Hmmm ... a lot of games work that way. IMO, that's a bug (and a security flaw in the design) in every case, but it's certainly a regrettably common flaw.

One method which works in some cases (although I've no idea whether it'll work in the specific case of BG) is to change the security settings of the whole folder (i.e. the Baldur's Gate program folder, wherever that is in any particular case) to grant Full Access privileges to the All Users group. Of course you'll need an Admin logon to make this change, but only once, and (if it works) then thereafter you'll only need an ordinary logon to play.

If that doesn't work, then ... um, tricky. It depends why you don't want to use the Admin account ... one workaround is to create another Admin account (i.e. a new username with Admin privileges), alongside the "main" Admin account, and then use that to play.

BillyYank

OK. It looks like I figured this out. Thanks Gallowglass, your reply got me thinking down the path that led to the solution.

I had already checked the permissions to the install directory, and when I double checked just now, I saw that none of the files had been updated since install anyway, so it couldn't have been that.

I wondered if perhaps the save file location had been hard coded to the Admin profile location during installation, so I started looking for an .ini or config file. When I couldn't find one, I thought of the registry. I searched the registry for "baldur" and found a suspicious setting.

In HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers are entries for all my GOG games. BGIIEE and IWDEE are set to HIGHDPIAWARE while BGEE was set to ~WIN7RTM RUNASADMIN. I changed BG to match the other two and made the same change in HKU\(SID)\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers.

Started up BG and it just works! I did a quick test and I can start a new game, save and load games. I suppose there's a possibility that this might cause a problem down the line, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

Now I've got to get on email and give a clueless GOG.com support rep the olde what-fore.