A little over a year ago I set out to determine exactly why, prior to Window Vista, the Power Users security group was considered by most to be the equivalent of the Administrators group. I knew the answer lay in the fact that default Windows permissions allow the group to modify specific Registry keys and files that enable members of the group to elevate their privileges to that of the Local System or Administrators group, but I didn’t know of any concrete examples.

At Mark Russinovich's blog.

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