I'd like to add for the record, couatl was installed this way
No, it wasn't.
it was not marked to be in administrator mode by me.
Couatl.exe is not compiled to ask for admin permissions by default (and if it were, it would always ASK to start that way), and this can be checked by the lack of a small yellow shield on its icon, which appears when executables are pre-configured that way.
And, if it was configured that way, you wouldn't see the "Administrator" flag checked in the Compatibility tab, but the program would always ask to run as Admin instead, at each startup.
Only the administrator user of the computer can set the "Administrator" flag checked in the Compatibility tab so, it must have been you trying to fix it, and forgetting it. Note that, since that's a setting in the registry, it's possible you did it long ago, in a previous installation.
In addition to that, it's not correct having Couatl.exe being present in both EXE.XML files (the one under %APPDATA% and the one under %COMMONAPPDATA% ), the proper location for P3D V3 is %COMMONAPPDATA%, and our installer will automatically *remove* it from %APPDATA% and add it to %COMMONAPPDATA%, so you are not supposed to copy its lines again manually.