I set myself as away all the time… Maybe we’re talking about different things here, but I have no problems changing my status on Vista.

As Inferno_str1ke said, it’s not possible to do in Google Talk itself. If you’re using a third-party program, such as Pidgin or Miranda, then you can do it.

I don’t think it’s there to protect just stupid people. I went to college with people who were pretty darn good at hacking into computers, and the littlest things can compromise your system. Think about how many websites you go to in a days time that you’ve never visited before, such as from Digg. Can you trust them all? I may not agree with how UAC works all of the time, and I may even complain about it, but it’s there to provide added protection. I’m definitely not going to pass up an opportunity for extra security, and I can deal with the handful of prompts that I receive each day.

Also Ryan, you say you had a UAC problem with it – how are you still running UAC so long after Vista came out? I tried to live with it for a week and disabled it, latest reformat I disabled it after two hours. It’s there to protect the PC against stupid people, and even then people click OK anyway because it shows up so often.