How can you access Steam from a "Limited Account" in XP Home Edition..

[All_Steamed_Out]

..A friend wants to keep a family member out of her personal files on the home computer. This family member is the one who plays (the retail CD of) Half-Life2.

After password protecting her rights as "Computer Administrator" in User Accounts, she reduced the family member to a "Limited Account".

When trying to access software from that limited account, a few limitations occured. In terms of games Steam, and Hitman2 both got error messages when attempting to load (FarCry, Battlefield1942, Doom3, Chronicles of Riddick, all were fine).

The Steam error message indicated that Steam could not write to the folder it was stored in, due to the User's current privileges. The error message did suggest that this could be solved by moving the directory to a place (folder?) which could be accessed with these current level of privileges.

Anybody out there have any experience with this issue as to XP User accounts?

I'd love to hear from anyone who has implemented a solution. I am concerned about screwing around with Steam, given how finicky it was to install originally.

Thanks in advance.

 

[oldagerocker]

Your friend can put all her personal files into My Documents for protection and give the guy an admin account. They still wont be able to get into them files without physically removing the harddrive and changing the ownership on another computer.

Steam should work though, unless she's installed that into my docs or something... or it just doesnt work under limited accounts.... if not, do the above.

 

[Chris D]

Press F8 on start up, choose Safe Mode, choose the Administrator account and if that isn't password protected (most aren't) then go into User Accounts and set herself up as an administrator there.

 

[All_Steamed_Out]

Hi Chris_D:

Thanks for your suggestions. But, creating passwords from the User Accounts field in Control Panel isn't where I'm stumped. It's trying to get Steam to run from a desktop with "Limited Account" privileges.

Here's a little further information:

1) She has not set up any passwords in User Accounts. When XP was installed, she was the primary user. I am encouraging her to at least add a password to her account.
2) All current users have "Computer Administrator" status.
3) If she reduces the privileges of any user to "Limited Account", and then switches from her desktop to that user's account - Steam will not allow that "Limited Account" to write to it's files (or load), only an account with "Computer Administrator" privileges. Clicking on either the Half-life2 or Counter-Strike icons obtain the same result.
4) The error message, seems to suggest that moving the entire Steam (or Valve, I guess) directory into a folder is accessible from a Limited Account will overcome the problem. An example may be the "Shared Documents" folder.

This seems easy enough to implement on the face of it. As I mentioned in my initial thread, I am concerned about tampering with Steam given how finicky it was to install.

If I move the entire Valve directory out of Program Files and into Shared Documents - will it still function properly?

I have emailed tech support at Steam, but we all know how rare a response from them is.

Have you had any experience with this issue?