What is it with me and these "Permissions"??

I am having some "issues" (I know, "shocking", coming from me, eh?).

I am having problems (seriously frustrating problems) which seem (to me) to be related to my lack of knowledge regarding "User Accounts" (the "Limited" type and the Admin variety) and their relation to/with "Permissions", etc.

Is there somewhere ... ANY-where, an ("simple"?) tutorial or something along that line - aside from Windows "explanations", that could possibly help me break this all down??

As it stands, I have (for better or worse) FOUR (4) UA's on this Vista (Home Basic) PC of mine (one for myself, one for admin, one for my seven-year-old son, and one for friends/family that may wish to use the machine) and things are just all screwed-up (again, a real shocker, huh?).

For instance, I like having McAfee's Site Advisor for search engines. Well, it will work in my UA in both Firefox and IE7, but it won't work in Firefox on my "friend's/family" UA - though it does work in IE7 of that account (?!?).

Another thing is, I can download things in my UA, but cannot download in the Admin UA. And sometimes I can "Run" programs "as Admin" in the various UA's -and other times - not.

Again, I think it all stems (fully) from a lack of understanding on my part of how these things ("Permissions", etc.) work ... how to properly set them up (and have them be as Secure as possible - at least the Admin UA). It seems to me that I should be able to go into MY OWN Admin, and set-up things that I wish to have "Global", as Global, and I should certainly not be "Blocked" (though only in Firefox, I believe) from downloading into my own Admin UA - correct.

Have a nice day/night.
Glenn ...

 

Hi Halo - wow, thank you very much. I briefly skimmed the links you provided, and it appears to be a lot of good info., at least for me to get started learning more about this.

I came to a bit of a (long-standing) sticking-point almost immediately where the paulstamatiou.com site referenced; "...full read/write permissions...".

My "understanding" of that phrase (in a very basic or simple sense) is: "Read" = access to a program, and "Write" = ability to manipulate or change a program ... is this (basically) correct?

Thanks again, and I will certainly be spending some time with the links you've provided!