Vista UAC - permissions and certificates for an exe

Question

I'm a bit of a newbie with regard to UAC and certificates.

I have an installer (bespoke) that needs to write files to Program Files, set registry keys, create SQL databases, add start menu shortcuts, etc. It thus requires elevation for pretty much everything it does.

If this application is run under Vista, an orange UAC dialog is shown (to paraphrase: The publisher of this app is unknown, Vista doesn't know whether or not to trust it, are you sure you want to run it?)

I presume that the way around this would be to get a certificate (Verisign or similar) so that Vista knows who the publisher is - but will this leave me with the same dialog simply saying "publisher XYZ is untrusted" (a complete waste of money), or will it allow customers to install our product without any scary orange UAC dialogs (only "friendly" green/blue ones) appearing?

Answer 1

By signing the installer, the yellow UAC warning dialog will change its color to gray and the text will be like:

A program needs your permission to continue

If you started this program, continue