Administrator Access?

[Sawnec]

I found the issue. It was a combination of Steam and FFXIV. I detailed it in the OP.

Except FFXIV doesn't need to run as admin, unless an update is being performed.....

its a steam side issue, probably caused by their annoying overlay injection.

It was sort of steam side.

This should have everything to do with fixing your problem. Or have you not been reading the replies in this thread? The very first hit to the HowTo Geeks article is describing a work around to making a game run with admin privileges when launched from within Steam....which, as noted earlier, is what one often needs to do.

Sorry for directing you to a google search result, but I don't use Steam...and the solution appeared to be extremely easy to find. There seems to be a growing trend lately where users either aren't even trying to search the web for solutions, or they have weak google-fu...so I put forth the exact search I used to find what seems like a plausible solution to your problem.

Sorry if you don't find that helpful...but you may want to try following that guide just in case it does indeed fix your issue before you write it off so quickly.

The problem was I did not want it running as an administrator. Relatively, I completely ignored your half-assed attempt at "help." There is no reason why the game needs admin permissions at all in the first place, but apparently it needs them when patching. It was an issue that I have outlined in the OP, and was completely unrelated to permissions settings or anything silly FFXIV was doing.