Running scared

So here's something really silly.

As you probably know, I run my machine pretty
well locked down
. Then I get nervous whenever I do one of these things:

1) Lower
my IE security settings to the default level ("Medium" for the
Internet Zone) so that I can view a web site or download something

2) Run
something as Administrator

3) Disable
Software Restriction Policies

4) Run
as Administrator AND set the IE settings to the default level AND without SRP
enabled

The silly thing is that #4 is what most people do all day,
every day. They run as Administrator, they have IE set to the default settings,
and they've never even heard of SRP. And this is actually a supported
environment, and provided you are up to date with all your Windows Update patches,
etc. it should be pretty safe.

It's not wrong to work like that, and you get the most
functionality out of Windows in this mode. But for some reason I always get a
bad feeling whenever I do that...