Is there any way to get the game to run w/o requiring an administrator access? I see other folks referring to running it w/o admin rights via the Steam overlay. If I had known it required Administrator access I likely would have waited until it was out on steam (assuming they fixed it). I know it's a old game and maybe requires some sort of magic access, but if I at least knew what privileges it needs I could use some windows tools to give the program just that amount of access (I had to do that for other games that requested admin access but didn't really need it).

once the game is installed, you can just copy it on an usb drive and move it to the pc without admin access, but to actually run the GOG installer, admin right are required.

which is a bad thing, I think.

Excellent, THANKS. (blush...of all things...I forgot to check for a secondary launcher) .

Creating a new shortcut to Shock2 did the trick. BTW, I used the windows installer to install to c:\games\shock (in case some of the mods/etc don't like spaces in the filenames), then used icacls to set my normal user account as the owner of all the files so I can do all of the other management as non-admin.

What are the consequences of running 'Shock2.exe' directly as opposed to 'start.exe'? (If any?)
*EDIT*
Nevermind, on another thread this was discussed and it doesn't seem to be much beyond a check to see if 'chrome.exe' is running or something... no biggie...