This would only be useful if installing things from an untrusted source. But there is another way without being prompted to do so every time you want to open something and that's called Sandboxie. Just my opinion again I don't really want to get into a debate about it I have my preferences as do you . Have you resolved your problem ?

Well it looks like you have tried all the normal things to correct the problem, short of a Stardock rep seeing this thread, if you haven't all ready, you should email [email protected] and start a support ticket, link them to this thread.  Oh, only do one email, doing multiple emails about the same problem just puts you to the back of the line.

Hope you get this worked out.

A thought...

You did turn off your firewall and antiviral(s) while installing, yes?

Yep, e-mail is sent to Stardock, I hope they help me too, I absolutely hate reinstalling my computer and I only did it on Sunday

It's not just installation UAC protects you, its runtime too. Of course, Sandboxing is one way of providing security. You can have a completely sandboxed OS like an iPhone or iPad, but then there are times when you need to write to the OS, or even perform an administrative task. I don't know, maybe in those instances we can have some sort of prompt that asks for permission, now what a mechanism that would be

Also yes I tried reinstalling while the A/V/Firewall was disabled.

I had this error once on the PC I have for guests to use and I solved it by turning UAC off, uninstalling windowblinds completly and manually deleting the 3 directories it installs to. Then I  rebooted, reinstalling Windowblinds while UAC was still turned off, rebooted again and then I turned UAC on. 

At that point I rebooted and all worked fine.

Sounds worth a try, thanks, that would be everything in:-

C:\Program Files (x86)\Stardock\Object Desktop\WindowBlinds

C:\Users\Public\Documents\Stardock\WindowBlinds

and any where else? (there's a 3rd folder?)

Well just tried as CarGuy suggested and no dice, I still can't get Windowblinds and UAC to work together.

C:\ProgramData\Stardock

Open the scan file and see if it didn't repair something or where the install failed:

Elevated CMD /notepad c:\windows\logs\cbs\cbs.log

No Windowblinds folder in C:\ProgramData on my system. What exactly am I looking for in cbs.log?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928228

Can't see any instances of "Cannot repair member file" in that log.

Run: sfc /verifyonly

After it's done, input: findstr /c:"[SR]" %windir%\Logs\CBS\CBS.log >%userprofile%\Desktop\sfcdetails.txt

Open sfcdetails.txt from Desktop

The file contained 366 lines, each line is a datestamp, followed by Info, CSI, then a hex code, the file looks like this from beginning to end:-

2011-10-25 20:38:34, Info                  CSI    000002e2 [SR] Beginning Verify and Repair transaction
2011-10-25 20:38:35, Info                  CSI    000002e4 [SR] Verify complete

There are no error codes or anything like that. I can post the entire file if you like but I doubt it would do anything other than clutter up the thread, correct?

Ok...this appears to be a user account issue. Did you let Windows auto install and use that account or did you set up another user account?

I'm using the same account at the moment for everything.

Meaning what? What are you logged in as? Standard account with Admin privileges or the Admin account?

The account that was created when I installed Windows, it has the standard Windows 7 admin rights (i.e I still have to confirm with UAC when I install something or make a system change).

Out of interest, I tried making a new account. Windowblinds does not work at all under the new account. First time I loaded it it bought up a list of skins but just reverted the desktop back to classic when I applied one. After a reboot Windowblinds just opened up an empty window with no skins to choose. It still has the same problem on the original account.

Getting to the end of my tether with it now I just don't understand why it's having so many problems.

That makes two of us.....

Control Panel / User Accounts: What's checked; Standard or Administrator?

Also look in Events Viewer / Windows logs. What kind of errors is it throwing?

Administrator

Could not see anything relevant. I did fire up the old Sysinternals Process Monitor, bit of a needle in the haystack but I did see this:-

RegQueryValue HKCU\Software\Stardock\WindowBlinds\WB5.ini\Wallpaper\SwitcherMode NAME NOT FOUND

Also, I found something else that might be quite significant. The problem does not occur with the Cideral skin at all. It does with Corporate, Windows 8 and Sublime though. Cideral, for whatever reason, seems to be skinning only the taskbar and start menu and not the Windows Explorer windows.

I believe I've solved this and I actually think I've found a bug in Windowblinds.

Since I don't have much room on my C: drive, one of the first things I did was move the library folders (public documents, my documents) from C: to D: Now, I did not use any crazy registry hacks or custom installs to move %APPDATA% or anything wild like that, just the standard Microsoft documented procedure for moving the users My Documents folder and the Public documents folder. However, I noticed that Windowblinds was still installing its skins into C:\users\public.

What I did was copy the skins into the d:\users\public, this has now cured the problem. I think WB is getting confused as to where the skins are supposed to live. I'm not keen on having to have two copies so I might just switch the public library back to its original location (not that I keep a lot in the public documents anyway).

So, so far it works, I will keep testing and report back if I find anything else.

 Already concerned about space on a fresh install? As cheap as HDD's are, now would have been a good time to upsize your C drive.

With SSD's becoming more popular and affordable, Stardock needs to add a way to change install directories for things like WB's, CFX Themes, IP's, etc. 

In Public Documents/ Stardock alone I have 10Gb's worth of "stuff" and I am sure most folks have as much or more.

I like to keep the C partition small so that it can be easily and quickly imaged/backed up. I quite agree on your second point, it would possibly saved me a great deal of hassle if there was just a quick way of setting and checking the default skin directory.

It probably would have helped from the beginning if you had mentioned you had a non-standard Windows installation.

MS 'requires' the heirarchy of Public Docs, etc to be followed by Application programmers hence the locations to which Windowblinds installs....;)

Fair enough, in my defense as I pointed out though, I only changed it through the library settings, no crazy non-standard registry hacks or whatever and the original public docs folder was still there on the C: drive (just generally unused), so there shouldn't be a need to have two copies of the Windowblinds folder just because I moved the library folder.

Medicare and Medicaid were bad enough. Now MS too? Derned MS! I ain't a Public nuthin'!

Them and their Pkek keys. Better not touch my EFI either.