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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.

3 Answers 3

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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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Also you can define an undocumented environmental variable __COMPAT_LAYER.

From the cmd.exe command line:

set __COMPAT_LAYER=RunAsInvoker
mycommand.exe
0

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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  • Man, I was explicit. Is it possible to run this program without giving it administrative privileges? Dec 10, 2010 at 6:31
  • As was I. "If the application is compiled to require elevation then it will always prompt." The only way around that would be to disable UAC.
    – mrdenny
    Dec 10, 2010 at 9:50
  • To stop things from prompting you would need to change the UAC settings. - This essentially gives the process an administrative token. Dec 16, 2010 at 9:49

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