I made my first GOG purchase last night: this game and three others. I've installed all four, and while the other three gave me no problems, Septerra Core installs with the .exe clicked for Compatability Mode with Windows XP SP2, to disable visual themes, and to run as administrator. This causes the shortcut icon on desktop to have one of those stupid Vista UAC shield icons over it. And then it requires me to go through a UAC warning and Allow the program to run.
The other three games (Arcanum, Port Royale, and Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption) did not do this. They start up fine, no UAC annoyances.
When I uncheck the "Run as Administrator" selection, that's when Septerra Core starts up without the UAC annoyance, but that stupid shield icon overlaying the shortcut icon never goes away. Yes, it bothers me.
Does anyone know why Septerra Core installs wonky like that? Any solutions or ideas? I'm running Vista 32-bit Home, and I do have my own user account set as the administrator. Or however that should be said so it makes proper sense.
(Also, an added but unrelated question: I read a post on the Arcanum forum where someone was recommending to install the games outside the Program Files folder. Why is this, one, and is there any merit to that suggestion?)
Thanks!

You can replace the shortcut with a fresh one just by right clicking your desktop, setting a new shortcut and directing it to the game. Now though there is probably a reason it installed with all those things already set and it was probably to provide compatibility on modern operating systems. By removing administrator you might possibly have problems later in the game with saving or events that need to write to disk.
This leads into your question about program files, both vista and win7 are very protective of program files. They generally only allow programs with administrator privaliges to write data to the program files folder. This isn't so much a problem with new games that keep the saves etc in my documents but for old games they ususally write to the games folder to save. If you don't have permission it can cause problems and not save the data. If you install outside program files you don't need to give the program administrator permission to write data(most the time) and you avoid all that bother.

Aha! That makes sense, regarding the Program Files folder. Thanks.
I loaded up Septerra Core, like I said, to see how it'd run - messing around with the options didn't seem to change anything about the initial load, but I didn't play it at all long enough to see if there'd be problems with saving. Redemption has some documented problems with overwriting saves, supposedly fixed by clicking the "Run as Administrator" box, but without the box clicked I was able to save just fine. So I'm not sure, but UAC is so freaking annoying.
Thank you for the reply.

Well its possible to disable UAC,
link below is a guide on how to do so.
[url=]http://www.petri.co.il/disable_uac_in_windows_vista.htm[/url]
UAC does add extra security though so its up to you if you want it or not.

Yeah, I know how to disable UAC. Not that I necessarily want to.
As annoying as it is/can be, it doesn't pop up that much for me since my user account has administrator access. So it's just odd and fairly annoying to see it pop up now, and weird since it's only one of the three games.

Re UAC icon on the shortcut, the GOG installation adds a shortcut for the game in the 'Games' folder. You can then create a shortcut for these links/copy and they will not have the UAC icon though you may still get prompted by the UAC.

Also the icon used in the 'Games' shortcut is slightly different, namely you can see a transparent bounding box. So to fix that just update the icon with those in the game's install directory.