You can disable UAC to avoid those security prompts. But seriously, what you shouldn't do is copy things in C: If you want to copy data use the places for that, the AppData and UserData folders. You can even use My Documents that so many games and apps like to fill with crap lately. But C:? Come on...

"c:\a\" is hardly 'long' ... and it's not your root...."c:\" . MS won't wet their knickers if you dump all your crap in that 'a'.

VicenteC sometimes we dont control everything around us. I get assigned to a project some other guy worked on. That guy decided to use extremly long names for everything he did. Brancheing multiple times then starts giving problems. Reworking everything he did would take a crap load of time.

So no not my shortcommings but someone elses.

Jafo i have no clue what your on about with the c:\a\ is it long? no its 1 letter why would it be long?. And why would MS wet there knickers over anything?

But seriously lock this thread or something. Apparently people consider it leet hacking or something because someone want to write to his C:\ folder on a Win7 machine.

ADHD is a bugger.

By the way, if you really want to know how to run 'as root' under windows 7:

The feature is called "admin approval mode". It makes administrator accounts run programs with standard user privileges unless you explicitly tell it to run as administrator. This makes it so that if you run a program under an administrator account, it does not have write access to c:/.

If you disable "admin approval mode", all programs run with administrative privileges unless you or the program explicitly drop said privileges. You can disable this mode from the "local security policy" window, also known as "secpol.msc". This policy editor is not available in the 'home' flavors in windows 7, but considering this is a company computer, I can safely assume you have a 'business' flavor of windows 7. The setting is under "Local policies\Security Options" and is called "User account control: Run all administrators in admin approval mode".

I hope this answers your question on how to 'run as root'.

Also note that any changes to said security policy will require a full reboot to take effect.

Of course we can't control everything around us (a pity), but the right solution nearly always is to solve the mess (it would be a far worse situation if it was a third-party component you must use, but it seems that's not your case). I suppose this is something done originally for XP where you could just do as you pleased with the computer (even if it wasn't recommended). Now in Vista/W7 those recommendations are enforced by the system, and this problem has appeared. And who knows what will happen in the next version of Windows, but things will only look equal or worse for this type of behavior.

Ridiculous oversight that we can't see edits for the first post but we can for everything else. Now no one knows what's going on. Fail.