https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50804
--- Comment #21 from Zebediah Figura z.figura12@gmail.com --- (In reply to Chris Caudle from comment #20)
(In reply to Zebediah Figura from comment #18)
My guess is that it was broken by wine-staging commit 811467bf6a4, and my further guess is that it won't run on Windows unless you explicitly run it with elevated privileges.
We'll need some way of explicitly elevating privileges in wine, to accompany that patch.
How does wine handle requests to write to what would be Windows system directories? One possibility for why this program does not always trigger the problem, or trigger with the exact same symptoms, is that in most cases it only needs access to the (Windows) user directories, but when it checks for updates it needs to write to \Program Files\LTC\LTspiceXVII which would need admin privelege to write to on a Windows machine. The equivalent on my linux machine would be ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/LTC/LTspiceXVII/ which any process running under my user account should have access to. Everything under .wine/drive_c appears to have rwxrwxr-x permissions, so perhaps that is not related. Just something that came to mind regarding why the application may not behave identically on ever start.
We don't actually prevent access to system files. In fact, we don't actually restrict access to anything at all just based on whether the user is reported as an administrator. However, some applications demand to be treated as one or the other, and call dedicated APIs to check the elevation of the current process.
Bug 39262 is about the other case, where the application wants to be a non-administrator. The linked wine-staging patch takes the approach of reporting all processes as non-administrator, and automatically elevating them when requested (i.e. where Windows would spawn a UAC prompt and ask for credentials). However, some applications don't use that method, and instead demand that the user uses right-click and "Run as Administrator". We'll need to implement the latter in Wine.