I dont' think Zanzo was referring to Microsoft with the sloppy programmers comment.  I'm sure that was directed at Smith Micro or whoever they contracted with for developing their installation model. 

Look.. the bottomline is Vista and UAC have been on the market for over 3 years now.  I have dozens of applications on my system that have installed with no headaches with UAC on in Vista 64bit.  Install headaches that occur with a mature operating system are signs of very sloppy and lazy quality control at the tail end of development.  They clearly did not test the various install options that they make available to the user.  

Go ahead and try this on your Vista 64 bit system.  Turn on UAC, install Poser 8, choose the "Backwards Compatibility option" so your content is installed on the C drive in a Poser directory instead of the default install option of the User shared drive.  The search feature will be completely disabled.  If they make the option available for users, they should test it! 

The whole point of UAC is so the user doesn't have to worry about install headaches.  Things should just work while UAC is left on.  This is the job of the application developers not Microsoft.  The specs that spell out exactly what you need in your install routines have been published by MS for years.  There is no reasonable excuse for this. 

Ultimately I got it working by uninstalling, turning off UAC and reinstalling.  And that's just stupid.  You should never have to turn UAC off if the developer is doing their job.  The only difference UAC makes is to require your permission.  At some point during the install, Smith Micro forgot to put the request permission notification up.  So the aplpication's access to the C drive was blocked by UAC.  Again...very very sloppy.

My first install had UAC on and I chose to install it using the "for best backwords compatibility" option where it installs the runtime in a Poser directory on the c: drive vs. having the content installed on the shared User drive.  (The shared User drive was the default recommended option for users with Vista and UAC on.)  But if it doesn't work another way, don't provide the option to a user. 

The bottomline is Smith Micro should have been aware that the "backwords compatibility" install option will disable the search feature if you have UAC on in Vista when installing the application.

Now that Poser 8 is installed and the search feature does work as advertised, I turned UAC back on and everything seems to work ok.

Allan