Jimmy O Regan writes "Justin Mason (of SpamAssassin fame) has this blog entry[http://taint.org/2004/08/20/024522a.html]: US Patent 6,775,781[], filed by Microsoft, is a patent on the concept of 'a process configured to run under an administrative privilege level' which, based on authorization information 'in a data store', may perform actions at administrative privilege on behalf of a 'user process'."