I'm with Ghostavo on this - jr2, you are doing something wrong, as I have UAC on and have never had any trouble adding shortcuts to the Start Menu via simple drag-and-drop.
Now, that said, I also can't fathom why you're bothering since I haven't actually opened the Start Menu on either of my Win7 PCs in over a month - jump lists are just that awesome.
And UAC should never be switched off in Windows 7. Ever. Anything you need to do you can still do with a prompt. UAC's Vista implementation was flawed, yes, but it's been immensely streamlined in 7 and is an important security feature (I don't care how careful you are in your browsing, in the days when malware can be transmitted through Flash and Java, there are infection methods beyond your control).
What happened was 2 things:
1) I tried to create a shortcut in 'admin' territory (C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\GOG.com\Freespace 2 || User-land start menu is C:\Users\JP\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu)
2) I mistook the error message that resulted (You cannot place a shortcut here. Would you like to put it on the Desktop instead?) as an error message related to lack of privilege, rather than a system policy. Therefore, I elevated the two explorer windows I was using and got pretty peeved when it still didn't work.
If I had created the shortcut in an 'acceptable' location first, and then attempted to move it (which I did do with the elevated cmd prompt), the system would have prompted me for administrative approval and then done as I asked (I tried again using un-elevated Explorer windows just to see, and it did). Why it flat-out refuses to create shortcuts in admin-land, I have no clue. It's not like I'm attempting to put a shortcut in a place that does not exist in the filesystem (like the Control Panel).
