Perch 0.18 — one file, per-user, no admin
The Windows build of Perch installs into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Perch, writes its shortcut and its uninstall entry under HKCU, and never shows a UAC prompt.
That reads like a shortcut taken to avoid annoying people. It is the opposite: an elevated Perch would not work at all.
Why elevation breaks it#
Perch launches its own Chrome and mirrors a window out of it. An elevated process launches an elevated child, so an elevated Perch means an elevated Chrome — and Windows then puts User Interface Privilege Isolation between that Chrome and everything running as you.
The share picker lives on the ordinary desktop. The mirror has to be reachable from it. Raise the app above that desktop and the two halves can no longer see each other.
There is nothing to grant
Windows has no screen-recording permission to ask for. macOS does, and Perch prompts for it the first time you start a mirror. On Windows the correct number of prompts is zero, and anything that appears to be asking for permission is asking for something else.
What the installer actually does#
Everything lands in one place, and the uninstall lives inside Perch.exe rather than in a second binary. A separate uninstaller would be another copy of the self-contained .NET runtime — roughly half the install again, sitting on disk to be used once.
The one thing a process genuinely cannot do is delete the folder its own image is mapped from. That part is handed to PowerShell, which is present on every Windows and needs nothing copied anywhere.
What it does not remove#
Your Chrome profile. It is the only thing in the install holding anything of yours — sessions, history, cookies — and it dwarfs everything else on disk. Removing an app should never quietly take a browser profile with it. The uninstaller tells you where it is and leaves it alone.
Everything else goes to the Recycle Bin rather than being hard deleted. An uninstaller is exactly the wrong place to be irreversible.