What steps will reproduce the problem? 1. Run installer on Vista. 2. Get to step prior to copy.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead? Expected files to copy. Installer crashes.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system? Vista SP1.

Please provide any additional information below. Installer works when specifically run as administrator. Most python package installers on windows somehow signal the administrator privilege requirement so it does not run and crash without privilege elevation.

This is the default installer built by "python setup.py bdist_wininst" (using Python 2.6). Seems there was some discussion of these kinds of problems on the distutils list in 2007, but I can't figure out if it was resolved or not:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2007-July/007805.html

I recommend you file a bug report at http://bugs.python.org. You should probably tell them a couple pieces of information:

• Did you try to install it from an account with administrator privileges or without?
• Where is your Python installation? E.g. C:\Python26 or C:\Program Files...

My future plans are only to distribute .msi files (using "bdist_msi"), but there are a couple of patches (on python.org) that need to go in, and PyPI still doesn't support their upload.

This should be fixed in the argparse 1.0 .msi distribution. Please reopen this ticket if it isn't.