Adobe AIR non-Administrator application installation/upgrade on Windows

Question

Is there any way to allow non-Administrator users to install, upgrade or uninstall an Adobe AIR application on Windows?

I've made an Adobe AIR application and packaged it as a .air package using the standard AIR mechanism for creating deployment packages. If a normal or Power user tries to install this AIR application, the Application Event Log shows an error saying administrative rights are required. And even if the user elevates during installation, administrative rights are still required for an upgrade using the automated AIR upgrade system (since an upgrade is essentially, behind the scenes, an uninstallation of a .msi package followed by an installation of another .msi package).

Is there any way around this?

What I've tried so far is:

• Using the Group Policy editor, setting Windows Installer to elevate during installations. Doesn't work, since AIR attempts a "for all users" installation.
• Specifying My Documents as the installation directory. Doesn't work, since AIR attempts a "for all users" installation.
• Giving the user Modify access to the Program Files folder where the application would usually reside. Doesn't work, since this isn't a file permissions issue.
• Making the user a Power User. Doesn't work, since AIR attempts a "for all users" installation.

I'm guessing that both installing and upgrading would work fine for a user if

• the AIR installer would attempt to make an "only for me" application installation instead of a "for all users" installation, and
• the user was a Power User, and possibly
• the application was installed to My Documents

I'm also guessing that this problem doesn't exist on OSX and Linux, since they have more intuitive concepts for per-user application installations.

Answer 1

EDIT: As of Adobe AIR 3, you can use a "captive runtime" to avoid the administrator install of AIR. See the descriptions here and here. Disclaimer -- I haven't actually tried this.

ORIGINAL answer for pre-AIR 3:

There does not appear to be any way to work around this according to the AIR 1.5 Administrator's Guide section on installing apps, which states:

On Mac OS, to install or update an AIR application, the user needs to have adequate system privileges to install to the application directory (and administrative privileges if the application needs to update the runtime). On Windows, a user needs to have administrative privileges.

So this limitation apparently applies to all supported OSs. The tone of the document throughout makes it quite clear that AIR is designed to assure system admins that users will be appropriately locked down. AIR is not the happy pathway from browser to desktop that I'd hoped.