Which version of Vista are you running? You can of course turn all that stuff off, but from what I have read it might be better to set it to elevate without prompting and see what happens.
Look
here, towards the bottom of the page and it tells you how to do this. Maybe it would have something to do with what is going on and solve it.
I have read allot of other places where this is a better solution than turning it off totally. This is just the first one I found with a quick search telling the process. I can't remember if this works for all versions of Vista, seems like I read somewhere else that this works best, or maybe only with the Ultimate version. But it doesn't hurt to check if it will work with yours.