Well, I bought a new laptop over the weekend (I'm pretty excited about it--4GB
ram, Dual 2.0 GHz, NVIDIA 512, and a 64 bit system J), so I downloaded the 64
bit version of POV.  The problem is that all those little messages you get when
you first start using POV never go away!  You know, the ones that tell you how
you can change what happens when a render finishes, etc.  They all have the
nice little checkbox titled "never tell me again", but it ALWAYS tells me
again!  They won't go away!  Anybody have any ideas?

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"Kirk Andrews" <kir### [at] tektonartcom> wrote:
> Well, I bought a new laptop over the weekend (I'm pretty excited about it--4GB
> ram, Dual 2.0 GHz, NVIDIA 512, and a 64 bit system J), so I downloaded the 64
> bit version of POV.  The problem is that all those little messages you get when
> you first start using POV never go away!  You know, the ones that tell you how
> you can change what happens when a render finishes, etc.  They all have the
> nice little checkbox titled "never tell me again", but it ALWAYS tells me
> again!  They won't go away!  Anybody have any ideas?

Ok, I think I know what's going on, but I'm not sure how to fix it.  Of course,
my new machine has Vista (that power-hungry control freak), and it doesn't want
to let any changes happen within the program files folder.  I'm guessing that
POV needs to update a file in its directory to actually turn off all the boxes,
but Vista is preventing it from happening.  I don't suppose anyone knows how to
fix it?  Probably not, you are all smart people, and chose not to use Vista at
all...

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"Kirk Andrews" <kir### [at] tektonartcom> wrote:
> "Kirk Andrews" <kir### [at] tektonartcom> wrote:
> > Well, I bought a new laptop over the weekend (I'm pretty excited about it--4GB
> > ram, Dual 2.0 GHz, NVIDIA 512, and a 64 bit system J), so I downloaded the 64
> > bit version of POV.  The problem is that all those little messages you get when
> > you first start using POV never go away!  You know, the ones that tell you how
> > you can change what happens when a render finishes, etc.  They all have the
> > nice little checkbox titled "never tell me again", but it ALWAYS tells me
> > again!  They won't go away!  Anybody have any ideas?
>
> Ok, I think I know what's going on, but I'm not sure how to fix it.  Of course,
> my new machine has Vista (that power-hungry control freak), and it doesn't want
> to let any changes happen within the program files folder.  I'm guessing that
> POV needs to update a file in its directory to actually turn off all the boxes,
> but Vista is preventing it from happening.  I don't suppose anyone knows how to
> fix it?  Probably not, you are all smart people, and chose not to use Vista at
> all...

Ok, everyone else probably had this figured out from the beginning, but if you
want to know, I figured it out.  If you've got Vista, you need to go to the
control panel/user accounts and find User Account Control, and turn it off.
Then you can open up POV and tell it never to tell you all those little hints
again.  Afterward, you could turn user account control back on again if you so
desired.

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With Windows Vista, POV shouldn't be installed into the
"program files" directory, it will prevent user editing of
the POV .ini files, Vista considers all .ini files in the
"program files" directory to be system files.

Unfortunately the "program files" directory was the
default install location for POV with Windows XP,
and this change in MS policy toward .ini file extentions
means that applications like POV that use the .ini
extention for thier own editable files don't work correctly
when installed to the default location under Vista.

Other settings are stored in the registry, which is what
you enabled (I think), so your install is probably still
only partially working.  You might need to uninstall
and reinstall to a directory that won't conflict.

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"Kirk Andrews"
I've been using Vista 32-bit about a year now and have come across a similar
problem for any program that is installed in a Vista protected directory (one
of these happens to be a program files).  As long as you have administrative
rights ,as it sounds like you do, all you do is right-click either the povray
executable or a shortcut to it and select the "properties" option.  A window
will then appear goto the tab at the top named "compatibility" and click the
checkbox at the bottom that says "Run this program as an administrator".  Then
click "apply" or "ok" and all should be well.  Now this worked for 32-bit Vista
and I don't have access to a 64-bit Vista computer, but it should work.  Good
luck!

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"Kirk Andrews" <kir### [at] tektonartcom> wrote:
> Ok, everyone else probably had this figured out from the beginning, but if you
> want to know, I figured it out.  If you've got Vista, you need to go to the
> control panel/user accounts and find User Account Control, and turn it off.
> Then you can open up POV and tell it never to tell you all those little hints
> again.  Afterward, you could turn user account control back on again if you so
> desired.

This same thing has bugged me, but disabling UAC is not an acceptable solution
in my situation.  Is there any chance of a better solution which works within
the operating system instead of requiring interference with security?  Maybe
using whatever replaced the registry is a good idea; perhaps some folks who
write Vista apps can speak up.

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Mathuin wrote:
> Maybe using whatever replaced the registry is a good idea; perhaps some
> folks who write Vista apps can speak up.

Huh? The registry hasn't been replaced, and probably won't be anytime soon.

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Nicolas Alvarez <nic### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Mathuin wrote:
> > Maybe using whatever replaced the registry is a good idea; perhaps some
> > folks who write Vista apps can speak up.
>
> Huh? The registry hasn't been replaced, and probably won't be anytime soon.

Cool.  I haven't looked that far under the covers, and I'd heard that Vista was
going to have some new thing in place of the registry.  That being said, would
that be an appropriate solution or is there something else?  I'm sure other
applications have faced this problem in the past, and have a solution that
doesn't involve disabling UAC.

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Mathuin wrote:
> applications have faced this problem in the past, and have a solution t
hat
> doesn't involve disabling UAC.

This would seem to be the root of the problem:

"""
Applications written with the assumption that the user will be running 
with administrator privileges experienced problems in earlier versions 
of Windows when run from limited user accounts, often because they 
attempted to write to machine-wide or system directories (such as 
Program Files) or registry keys (notably HKLM)[3]. UAC attempts to 
alleviate this using File and Registry Virtualization, which redirects 



m 


write to that directory, the write will get redirected to 


"""

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control )

Normal users don't get to write to \program files any more. Per-user 
data really needs to go in the per-user directories (or per-user 
registry keys) in Windows, just like in UNIX. :-)

Altho last I asked, I was told this was fixed in the latest POV-Ray, so 
once it's out of beta....

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Mathuin wrote:

> This same thing has bugged me, but disabling UAC is not an acceptable solution
> in my situation.  Is there any chance of a better solution which works within
> the operating system instead of requiring interference with security? 

I don't have Vista, but I wonder if it would object if you
just specified a location within your personal %APPDATA% folder
as installation target for the POV installation. Then the INI
files should be writable. Just for one user, of course.

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