[Semaphor]

My first thought was "But back then those prompts were constant, making them almost useless", though maybe that did actually help by making software vendors rely less on admin rights?

[klodolph]

It was a big mess, because users didn’t expect it, developers wanted users to just have everything run as admin, and the UAC user experience wasn’t polished yet. But that’s what you expect from new security features being introduced.

[pjmlp]

That was the whole point.