Hello everyone.

When patch 1.4 hit, it boned my installation. I had to reinstall the game. One thing I learned is that Windows Vista users can have their profiles (where your character data is) saved in 2 different places, depending on the setting of their OS.

With User Account Control (UAC) turned on:
C:/Users/<windows username>/Appdata/Local/Virtualstore/Activision

Without UAC:
C:\Program Files\Activision\Call of Duty 4 - Modern Warfare\players

Backup this folder before patching or reinstalling your game. I had to start from scratch because I unknowingly deleted my character as part of the uninstall / reinstall process.

I'm pretty sure that Windows XP folks should see this data in C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\application data\Activision\... (or something close to it).

UAC is an evil thing. It keeps hosing up which applications can run on Windows startup, and causes all kinds of evil things. It enforces a seperation of credentials, which is almost required now a days for security's sake. But since UAC sucks in Vista, I do it the old fashion way: UAC turned off, 2 user accounts, and the second one has no admin rights. The 2nd one is what I use to play games / internet / etc with. You can right click programs and such, choose Run As, and type in the admin username / password if you don't want to switch to the admin account to do program installations. This simple practice is almost as useful as an entire anti-virus program.

I thought that might be helpful information for people for future patches that come out.

Anyone else have a little pearl of wisdom?