Howard, you're quite right - I had the same questions for the people asking me to do this. The issue is that good ole management wants a user to be able to install his own software, but does NOT want a single account that everyone knows that would have \\computer\c$ access to the PC across the network.

Power Users won't work, unless I can somehow modify it. Office XP, for example, will not install with Administrator rights (unless you enable Elevated for the Win installer service). But that would only resolve the proble for msi-enabled apps, not legacy apps.