What are the minimum user permissions required to install a Windows service?

Question

What are the minimum user permissions required to install a Windows service?

Answer 1

Be a member of the administrators group, and Everything that entails. There would be a minimum set of permissions required to write the necessary registry keys to register a service and actually place the service exe in, say, program files.

But over and above that, any particular service may have, as part of its install, any amount of registration with other services on the PC. It might need to access SQL, IIS, register COM or DCOM components. It might need to, as part of the installation access the internet.

None of these things is going to be explicitly accounted for by the services author - probably many of them would be hidden under layers of library code. The only guarantee is, the developer developed it to install correctly with an administrator account.