Visual indicator that explorer is running as administrator

Question

Under Windows 7, I open an explorer window as administrator. How can I tell that this explorer window has admin privileges?

Either a visual indicator (e.g. an annotation on the icon or in the title bar) or some simple way of finding out (e.g. via a menu entry) would do.

This unanswered question asks for a more general feature; I'm primarily interested in Explorer. This related question asks about an application; this is not good enough for me since I have both admin and unprivileged instances of Explorer running: I need per-window information.

Answer 1

Aaron Margosis wrote an Extension to show in Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer its current elevation/IL level status:

• Low IL = protected mode
  
• Medium IL = normal operation
  
• High IL = administrator
  

Expand the Zip and register the DLLs with regsvr32:

regsvr32 path\PrivBar.dll
regsvr32 path\PrivBarx64.dll

Then enable the toolbar from the menu: “View” → “Toolbars” → “PrivBar” (or “PrivBar x64”, whichever appears). Repeat this in Internet Explorer to get the toolbar there as well.