One of the great beneficiaries of the TurboTax DRM fiasco of several years ago was H&R Block, as many TurboTax customers at the time fled to its TaxCut program. But one long-time customer thinks that TaxCut may lose its status as the mainstream alternative if H&R Block doesn't tighten up its programming practices.

"I've been a satisfied user of H&R Block's TaxCut for years," the reader wrote me recently. "Given what you've reported about Intuit's shenanigans in the past, I saw no reason to switch to TurboTax. Unfortunately, the latest version of TaxCut took a huge step backwards. It refuses to run on Windows without administrator privileges."

"In years past TaxCut needed to run as administrator for installation," the reader wrote. "It wanted to continue to run that way when doing your taxes, but it was trivial for anyone concerned about security to override that. This year that's changed. As far as I've been able to tell, there is no way to get it to run as a normal user. And to add insult to injury, it also changes permissions to C:\Program Files so only the installing account can access it; an amazingly stupid move for multi-user systems."

"Since this change in behavior is a regression, and since their support line insists it has to be that way, it must be a deliberate design choice," the reader concludes. "I won't trust any company with my sensitive financial information if they ignore the most basic security principles. I'm going to try to return it and use another tax preparation package."

Is one of your long-time vendors disappointing you with their current products? Post your comments below or write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com.