In setting up a Windows 7 Embedded system, I need to run a couple old installers that register DLLs. These are failing--some with errors and some just exit without apparently doing anything. One installer reports that registering a DLL fails (even when logged in as Administrator). Trying regsvr32 to manually register the DLL reports that it received error 0x80070005 E_ACCESSDENIED.
More bizarrely, one of the installers is recent enough to throw up a UAC prompt when run as a normal user--and then proceeds to install without problems. The same installer fails while registering DLLs when run as administrator.
I suppose something is wrong with the administrator account, but I don't have enough Win7 experience to guess what (and without the explorer shell it's harder to poke around without knowing exactly what you're looking for). I don't need the administrator account for anything after this so I'd be happy just finding a way to force the older installer to run with UAC-elevated privileges.