JIRA does not install well on Vista/Win7 with UAC and the Installer.

Vista/Win7 has the User Account Control (UAC). One of the things it does is run programs with non-administrator privileges even when the user has them. The user has to explicitly allow a program to elevate to administrator privileges (sudo for Windows).

When we install JIRA using the installer, the user must grant administrator privileges. This will create "c:\Program Files(x86)\Atlassian" such that only administators have write access (very good Windows).

If you then try to run JIRA with the startup scripts (i.e. not a service) it will not work (even as an admin user) since UAC will run the program as a standard user that only have read permisisons. JIRA needs to write to (bad JIRA):

• Atlassian\JIRA4.0\logs
• Atlassian\JIRA4.0\database (if using HSQLDB).
  ...
• Atlassian\Application Data\JIRA (the default home directory).

In an ideal world, we would put such files in another directory (i.e. %AppData%\JIRA40).

We then have to throw running JIRA as a service into the mix. In this case JIRA will probably work because services run with high enough privileges that it will have write permissions. It would be nice if both methods of execution used the same file layout.