Installer Question
 

Is there any particular reason why the installer needs administrative privileges to run? Not the web start component, but the jar it pulls down. I'm pretty sure it has an explicit check.

I'm sorry, I'm a bit paranoid after what the Curse guys pulled years ago.

EDIT-It performs the check regardless if the user has full access to the chosen install directory.

(Assuming Windows) Quite simply, because it's writing to the program files directory. Applications are not allowed to write to that directory without administrative permissions. Assuming you have WoW installed in a reasonable area, this should be the only time it asks for administrative permissions.

If you install it to Program Files, you'd still need administrative privileges every time it needed to be updated. I'd suggest defaulting to either %public% like WoW now does or %homepath% and dropping the explicit privilege check.

If they really want to default to %programfiles% they could check privileges while the archive is downloading and escalate if need be before executing it.