Long story short, had the motherboard die on my once trusty XP Inspiron 6400.
Bought another / later 6400 with it's own dedicated video card, threw 4g of ram in it, T7600 cpu an ssd drive and installed Win8.1.
The thing that irritated me no end was the file/folder permissions given that my account had Admin rights, though not entirely it seems.
Turning off UAC prompts meant squat, even taking ownership of files and folders.
So I enabled the Admin account, opened regedit & exported the policies assigned to the admin account & compared them to mine.
There were a few different entries, though only one was all I had to edit to give me full unrestricted access to the files / folders, and stopped me from
having to run everything as the Admin.
Iv'e since reinstalled 8.1 as the things I tried to get here were all unnecessary & possibly had consequences I'd have to rectify somewhere down the track.
The key in question;-
Originally "1" was my setting, "0" was the Admin.Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
"EnableLUA"=dword:00000000