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Denis Nikolaenko
Asked: 2010-12-09 15:49:52 +0800 CST

How to run a program marked as requiring elevation via UAC without actual elevation on Windows 7?

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I have a program, specifically an installer, which is marked is requiring elevation with highestAvailable approach. I am using an administrator account with UAC at the highest level.

Is it possible to run this program without giving it administrative privileges?

Another example of such a program is stock regedit.exe, I can happily run it under an ordinary user without any UAC prompts, but cannot start it in admin account without elevation.

Interested mainly in Windows 7, but would not hurt to have a solution for Vista.

windows-vista security windows-7 uac

3 Answers

  1. From SuperUser:

    For all apps with requestedPrivilegeLevel="highestLevel" in their manifest, you can use Microsoft's Application Compatibility Toolkit 3 to shim the application with the RunAsInvoker fix, which forces the app to run with your standard user tokens.

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  2. Best Answer

    Also you can define an undocumented environmental variable __COMPAT_LAYER.

    From the cmd.exe command line:

    set __COMPAT_LAYER=RunAsInvoker
mycommand.exe
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  3. If the application is compiled to require elevation then it will always prompt.

    To stop things from prompting you would need to change the UAC settings.

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