As much as it is recommended to do everything in limited account, there are a lot of things that become tricky. You can blame Microsoft if you want but in many cases other guilty (or just lazy) parties can be found. Your effort in doing things "the right way" is commendable but you will need a lot of patience. Assuming that you have XP Pro (Home may be different, I just don't have it here to try), create folder from admin account and put everything there the way you want. Right click on the folder, select "Sharing and Security" and allow "Full control" to all users. For DOSBox program and DLLs you can set "Read-only" but you have to make games themselves writable. Also, depending on settings, DOSBox may create some files in runtime, those have to be writable by other users as well.

All you should have to do is set the permissions on the DosBox Folder and the games folders.....

Well, I tried setting the permissions, but they don't seem to stick. I'll try a few more times to figure out what I'm doing wrong...

If they don't stick you are doing something wrong. Make sure you go into the advanced and that the permissions are not inherited from the above "level" but the one you set inherit to the subfolders.

Note that on XP Home, the game folders must be located beneath "Shared Files" (or whatever it is called in your language). On XP Home, that's the only location that's accessible for multiple users.

DOSBox itself doesn't need write permission for it's directory.

IIRC, the "capture" directory requires write permission and if you use a central dosbox.conf in your dosbox directory then that will also require write permissions if you plan to modify it frequently or have your other users do so. Since this is a home machine you probably have the dosbox.conf in each game directory tho.

I've decided to say the heck with it and make everyone's account an admin account. After all, we're all adults here, and there are ways to keep private stuff private. Thanks for everybody's help, tho. 😀

Great, now everybody can infect (wether on puropse or not) the computer.

Exactly. You shouldn't be using the admin account and for dosbox use it's totally not necessary. If you want you could make everyone and ordinary user and simply create a shortcut to and use "runas" to launch the dosbox process. Using Runas you can give DosBox admin privaleges and not have to worry about permissions. (Of course you'll have to give runas the password in cleartext or put the password on a postit or something).

As the others said, the distinction between Administrators and normal Users is not there to keep stuff private. It's there as a security measure.