Any harm in changing a user's group membership?

[Bert Hyman]

I know that deleting a userid and creating a new user with the same name
will have really nasty results with ownership of objects, etc., but what
about simply changing the group membership?

I'd like to change a member of the "Administrator" group to "Power User"
or simply "User" for a while to see what (if anything) stops working,
but only if I know that I can always change it back if things get
strange.

--
Bert Hyman St. Paul, MN bert@iphouse.com

 

[John John - MVP]

Bert Hyman wrote:
> I know that deleting a userid and creating a new user with the same name
> will have really nasty results with ownership of objects, etc., but what
> about simply changing the group membership?
>
> I'd like to change a member of the "Administrator" group to "Power User"
> or simply "User" for a while to see what (if anything) stops working,
> but only if I know that I can always change it back if things get
> strange.

It won't hurt anything other than user rights conferred by group membership.

John

 

[SC Tom]

"Bert Hyman" <bert@iphouse.com> wrote in message
news:Xns9DEE81D7AF16AVeebleFetzer@216.250.188.141...
>I know that deleting a userid and creating a new user with the same name
> will have really nasty results with ownership of objects, etc., but what
> about simply changing the group membership?
>
> I'd like to change a member of the "Administrator" group to "Power User"
> or simply "User" for a while to see what (if anything) stops working,
> but only if I know that I can always change it back if things get
> strange.
>
> --
> Bert Hyman St. Paul, MN bert@iphouse.com

You shouldn't have any problem changing it, but remember you'll have to
login as an admin to promote it back to an administrator.
--
SC Tom
-There's no such thing as TMI when asking for tech support.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

On 09/09/2010 1:45 PM, Bert Hyman wrote:
> I know that deleting a userid and creating a new user with the same name
> will have really nasty results with ownership of objects, etc., but what
> about simply changing the group membership?
>
> I'd like to change a member of the "Administrator" group to "Power User"
> or simply "User" for a while to see what (if anything) stops working,
> but only if I know that I can always change it back if things get
> strange.
>

I've seen sometimes that certain programs do not start when a user is
running in non-administrator mode. Usually it's things in their startup
that give these kinds of problems.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Bert Hyman]

In news7TRVlEULHA.2064@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl John John - MVP
<audetweld@nbnet.nb.ca> wrote:

> Bert Hyman wrote:
>>
>> I'd like to change a member of the "Administrator" group to "Power
>> User" or simply "User" for a while to see what (if anything) stops
>> working, but only if I know that I can always change it back if
>> things get strange.
>
> It won't hurt anything other than user rights conferred by group
> membership.

I changed my own group membership to "Power User."

The first thing I noticed was that during the login process, some
malformed, incompletely drawn window popped up and stayed stuck in the
middle of the screen. There wasn't enough content for me to indentify
it.

In Task Manager, the only running application was "Visual C++ runtime
library" (quoting from memory). Nothing showed up in the process list
that caught my attention. I could drag the window around, and after
clicking in the spot where the "X" to close button should be, it went
away.

Then, I saw that the "Quick Launch" section of the toolbar was empty,
although the blank space appeared to be the same size as it had been
when populated. Attempts to put things into that space got me an error
to the effect that I couldn't create shortcuts there and would I like to
put it on the desktop instead.

That was enough for me to change my group membership back to
Administrators until I've done some more research.

--
Bert Hyman St. Paul, MN bert@iphouse.com

 

[John John - MVP]

Bert Hyman wrote:
> In news7TRVlEULHA.2064@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl John John - MVP
> <audetweld@nbnet.nb.ca> wrote:
>
>> Bert Hyman wrote:
>>> I'd like to change a member of the "Administrator" group to "Power
>>> User" or simply "User" for a while to see what (if anything) stops
>>> working, but only if I know that I can always change it back if
>>> things get strange.
>> It won't hurt anything other than user rights conferred by group
>> membership.
>
> I changed my own group membership to "Power User."
>
> The first thing I noticed was that during the login process, some
> malformed, incompletely drawn window popped up and stayed stuck in the
> middle of the screen. There wasn't enough content for me to indentify
> it.
>
> In Task Manager, the only running application was "Visual C++ runtime
> library" (quoting from memory). Nothing showed up in the process list
> that caught my attention. I could drag the window around, and after
> clicking in the spot where the "X" to close button should be, it went
> away.
>
> Then, I saw that the "Quick Launch" section of the toolbar was empty,
> although the blank space appeared to be the same size as it had been
> when populated. Attempts to put things into that space got me an error
> to the effect that I couldn't create shortcuts there and would I like to
> put it on the desktop instead.
>
> That was enough for me to change my group membership back to
> Administrators until I've done some more research.

These things were setup while the user had administrative privileges,
when you demote the account some of these things no longer work due to
insufficient rights.

John