I run some apps on startup like Greenshot, Winamp, that have registered global hotkeys.
But these hotkeys do not work in apps that I run with Administrator privileges, so to use hotkeys I first need to switch to another noneleveted app and this is pretty annoying.
When running same Winamp as Administrator, it's hotkeys work fine in both non- and eleveted apps.
On Windows 7 I had not any problems with this. Searching Google had not give me any clues on how to fix this.
That's by design in Windows' User Account Control: it would be a potential security issue if any application were able to spy on key presses in applications with elevated permissions.
If you trust a specific program using a hotkey, you can configure it to always run with administrator privileges. As you're mentioning Greenshot specifically, that's one of the workarounds we suggest for this behavior.
Disclosure: I am member of the Greenshot team.
This problem might have existed in old versions of Windows, but doesn't exist today.
When programs hook the keyboard, all programs hooking the keyboard will be notified when keys are pressed. No one program can "own" the keyboard, which is a system resource.
This means that the fact that an elevated program has hooked the keyboard, does not block a non-elevated program from hooking it as well.
I have tested in Windows 10 both Winamp and Greenshot, and their global shortcuts have worked very well when the active window belonged to an elevated program.
If this problem ever existed, it disappeared a long time ago. Or it might have pertained to a conflict between several programs hooking the same global key.
