Why do profilers need administrative privs (on Windows)

Question

I've been evaluating profilers and memory checking tools for native C++ programs on Windows and all of them want to be installed and run with administrator privileges. I rarely log in as admin on my machine. If I need to install something or do something that requires administrative privileges, I use runas and it works pretty well.

Is it legitimate for a profiler to require admin privileges, or are the profiler developers just being lazy? Am I being unreasonable by rejecting all of these tools on this basis?

I'm developing with VS 2005 on an XP Pro machine.

Answer 1

Because they have to look at other process' memory, which is normally taboo.

Answer 2

some cpu profilers actually do a statistic averaging using OS interrupts... obviously they cannot do this without privileges for that :)