Granting an application program access to a resource as a function of a
privilege associated with the application program. An embodiment of the
invention employs a persistent, individual identity associated with the
components of an application program or a group of application programs
to allow an operating system to identify and differentiate between
different application programs or groups of application programs
installed on a computing system. The identity associated with each
component of an application program enables the identification and
removal or uninstallation of the application program. The identity also
enables isolation of resources of the application program and protection
of operating system resources.
