Dell Client Manager and Inventory Issues with Vista

For those of you on the cutting edge (or in some cases bleeding edge it often seems) and have already migrated to Vista, here's a tip for using Dell Client Manager with those Vista machines.

After deploying the Altiris Agent and Dell Client Manager agents (both flawlessly) we ran into a problem with none of the Vista machines returning a BIOS inventory. After checking the agents, it simply said "run failed".

After some troubleshooting, we tracked the issue back to permissions. We were using a local administrator account (the domain administrator account being more closely guarded than most country's nuclear secrets), but it still ran into problems with the User Account Control (UAC).

A Couple Options

Option one is to simply disable the UAC on the computers in question. Since some security policies may well prohibit exactly that, there is a second more underhanded way. Simply set a switch that always responds yes to UAC requests. The directions for that can be found here.

I realize this is not an ideal solution, but in the meantime, it is a workaround, and what's an IT department without at least one duct tape solution?

Enjoy!