At the St. Louis Heroes Happen Here Launch event, Denny Boynton used some mysterious utility that added a really nice touch to his demos and presentation. With a deft keystroke, Denny's screen would zoom smoothly to wherever his mouse was on screen. He used it to draw attention to various hard-to-read things like the Visual Studio Property Sheet. I was so interested in what he was doing, I corralled him after his talk and asked him about it.

He told me it was one of the Windows Sysinternals utilities called ZoomIt, and he promised to write a post, which I dutifully read. Now, I can't say I'm the person he quoted, though that's pretty close to what I said. So, I promptly downloaded the utility and ran it on my computer. That's when the trouble started. As Master Chief would say, I ran into a snag.

ZoomIt, like many of the Sysinternals utilities (my favorite being Process Explorer, but that is perhaps best saved for another post), is made available in a zip file. It's the world's greatest install: extract the executable, ZoomIt.exe, to your favorite folder and double-click the program to run it. ZoomIt — a completely self-contained, literally copy-and-run installable — causes Windows Vista to prompt you with a security warning:

Now the easy thing to do would be to uncheck the "Always ask before opening this file". And that would have worked, but I like to keep all my Sysinternals utilities under C:\Program Files, which is a protected system directory. This is where the trouble part of the story comes in.

You see, you can't unblock an applications that live under the Program Files folder while User Account Control (UAC) active. And you can't permanently unblock an application from its property sheet while UAC is active, either. Why does this become a problem? Well, the security prompt above will show every time you launch the program. You have two options: a brute force option and a more elegant option.

The brute force option is to turn UAC off — which I do not recommend, for many, varied, and obvious reasons, not the least of which is the security risk it exposes... and the pain of one or more reboots — and unblock the application. (Honesty time: before I discovered the more elegant approach below, this was how I unblocked applications like Process Explorer.) This takes a few solid minutes, especially if you turn UAC off then turn it back on, what with the two reboot cycles.

The more elegant — and faster, IMO — approach is to move the executable to another folder, right-click it and choose properties to pull up the property sheet, click the Unblock button (see below), click OK, and move the program back to your favorite folder in Program Files directory structure.

Problem solved! Now you can add a shortcut to the Startup folder or Quick Launch and have easy access to ZoomIt (or Process Explorer) without the security prompt splashing onscreen every time you launch the program.

For completeness it should be noted that if you put the ZoomIt executable in any non-system directory (e.g., Program Files, Windows, or other protected folders), you can easily uncheck the "Always ask before opening this file" checkbox on the security prompt dialog to unblock the application. The steps I list only apply when you place applications like ZoomIt in the protected Program Files folder.