Quote Originally Posted by petersen View Post
Therefore, it appears to me that if one does not care about the cosmetics aspect (and not intending to intrude into a restricted system area), his/her programs would run as usual without a manifest.
Dilettante, Petersen, & Wilis: THANK YOU for the amazing insight into these subjects! Your work has really helped clarify some of the muddied water I've been wading through (I'm not as smart as you guys - hopefully my code will still be valid and I'll still be breathing by the time I get through half of the volumes of info you've provided).

petersen: Your statement seems to be backed up by Si the Geek's definition in his post Si the Geek's discussion of Virtualization:

Quote Originally Posted by Si the Geek
Virtualisation (Windows Vista [and possibly later versions too])
On Vista if a user does not have permission to work with a file, Virtualisation comes in to effect.

This is a process to deal with programs that seemed to work properly on Windows XP/2000, but only because they were not tested properly under limited user accounts - if they had been, the issues described in 'User Permissions' section above would have been noticed.

What Virtualisation does is let the program think that it has got permission to work with those files, by creating copies of the files in a special location, and automatically re-directing the programs requests for those files.

While this allows badly written programs to run on Vista, it is not a perfect solution - one example of this is that if one user runs the program and it makes changes to one of the files, it will not be seen by other users who run the program (because the virtualised files are per-user)."
Seems he says that as long as users have full rights to modify a writeable file, Vista and 7 will not virtualize them.

I'm not averse to including a manifest file eventually, but want to make sure it's really necessary before I climb that hill right now. I understand the ramifications you guys discussed herein.

I'm also using Inno Setup and it seems very straightforward to set the rights.