Things have vastly improved the following is a rant of mine from 13 years ago. Fished out of Drafts and published April 2025.

I am so sick and tired of installing applications that assume that the local user will be an administrator.

Applications that have been developed with this assumption exhibit weird behaviour when you restrict the logged in user back to standard user permissions.

For example:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE is usually writeable by the administrative user but becomes read-only when a standard user logs in. Application developers seem to forget this and put the licensing mechanism and setting storage into HKLM causing the application to fail as soon as the standard user trys to use it.