Is I Or Isn't I?

So I have this nice new laptop with Vista on it, and for the most part, I'm pretty happy with it. I like the new look and feel of the interface elements, and I'm finding some of the new features to be more usable than the XP stuff that I'm used to.

However, Vista is doing one thing that's blowing my mind. My default account is an administrator one, but many programs will not "run as administrator" unless I specifically open them that way via a right-click context menu at run-time. The issue here is that when the programs don't run "as administrator," they're sometimes denied write access, so they may work in unexpected ways (or not at all). What kills me about this is that I'm logged onto an administrator account -- all my programs should run in administrator mode automatically! It's like my computer doesn't trust me, and it's a very frustrating experience.