There are guidelines for where developers are supposed to store configuration, and since Vista, it isn't in Program Files. In fact, making changes in Program Fi

There are guidelines for where developers are supposed to store configuration, and since Vista, it isn't in Program Files. In fact, making changes in Program Files is restricted to the System, or elevated processes. It is often times an indicator that a program is violating accepted practices if it requires elevation of privilege to run. Changes like that are supposed to be stored in the users AppData directory. For backwards compatibility. Vista and descendants provides a virtualized space where writes to restricted directories are allowed, but they are committed to a different isolated space on the disk, preventing a rogue program from, modifying files for which it should not have access. Neither Windows or Linux are perfect in this respect, but for a decade, Microsoft has been trying to unify how applications store user specific data and configuration. There are still ways for developers to abuse the system, but they are considerably restricted from the most glaring mistakes and in general it has gotten better with each revision.