im trying to find a way to quickly determine whether a user belongs to administrators group or not (if he/she does, then they will be allowed to perform an install otherwise recieve an error). I am working with macromedia installanywhere, so the options of programmiing are jpretty much limited to scripts...any dos script that can help me do that? or any reg entry i can read? any help is appreciated!

This script requires ifmember.exe from the 2003 ResKit @echo off ifmember /l Administrators > nul if not errorlevel 1 ( start installer.exe ) else ( echo You must be a member of the Administrators group to install ) Disclaimer: Script is untested "Computer security." — Oxymoron

sadly i asked we are unable to bundle this with our product without being able to go through tons of paperwork - i had come across ifmember.exe on ms resources page as well :(

Well, WMI's an option, but it's a pain. You could also try doing something only an Administrator could do, then stop if it fails. IE: ECHO. > "%SystemRoot%\_.tmp" || GOTO :EOF

If you can't use the resource kit, I think Razor's suggestion is probably as good as any other, as long as you delete any .tmp file written. If you don't want to create a .tmp file, you can try the following: net user %username% | find "Administrators" > nul echo %errorlevel% By the way, aren't Power Users also supposed to be able to install applications, not just Administrators?

I'd say, "not if the System Administrator is worth his wage," but who knows? The idea is still valid, even if the example is not.

No, I think your example is valid, too. It seems that Power Users can also write into %SystemRoot%, so your example would work.