SAGE Accounting Line 10 (and others) cannot run in a non-Administrative account under Windows 2000 / XP

System Requirements:

  • SAGE Line 10
  • Windows 2000

The Problem:

If you are attempting (or have) rolled out SAGE 10 onto your system, then you will have had the misfortune to find that if you attempt to run it in an account below that of Power User on the local system, it will not work.

SAGE either locks up at the application initialisation, flashes up and crashes or if you have by some fluke got a semi-valid set of system privileges it will refuse to let you log-in under any user account, including the ‘manager’.

The Fix:

It seems absurd that this application even shipped, and yet it did. The problem will only happen on NTFS volumes, if you have any FAT32 systems you’ll have found out by now that they work. Sage installs into the Administrative account, and as such it creates its folder set using Administrative permissions.

The problem is in effect very simple, but is completely undocumented anywhere and required some good old fashioned forensic work to suss!

In order to get it to work you need to re-jig the NTFS permissions. Please note that I have used “Advanced” permission terminology in an attempt to lock the process down as much as possible.

C:\Program Files\Sage\Accounts\
Effective Permissions: Write/Create/Delete

C:\Program Files\Sage\Accounts\ACCDATA\
Effective Permissions: Modify

C:\Program Files\Sage\Accounts\TaskOpt\
Effective Permissions: Modify

C:\Windows\Sage.ini
Effective Permissions: Write
Note: If it doesn’t exist, create it using notepad

C:\Windows\System32\sglch32.usr
Effective Permissions: Create

C:\Windows\System32\sageinformer50.ssf
Effective Permissions: Create