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I've just installed, on Vista 32-bit, a program which in my opinion shouldn't require administrator rights. It's not installed in a system directory, and its purpose shouldn't obviously require any special privileges. However, the .exe has a UAC shield on it, and it asks me to elevate privileges immediately upon execution.

I'm prepared to risk it doing nasty things with the privileges of my user account, but not prepared to risk elevating it. Is there anything I can do short of setting up a virtual machine for it (or downloading the source and compiling it myself)?

(FWIW, the program in question is Pencil - pencil.evolus.vn/en-US/Downloads/Application.aspx - but I'm more interested in general answers than app-specific ones).

Peter Taylor
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2 Answers2

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For this particular program, you can get around the UAC requirement:

Instead of running Pencil normally, create a shortcut to evolus\pencil\xulrunner.exe, and then add --app ..\app\application.ini to the end, so the short cut is:

  • "C:\Program Files (x86)\Evolus\Pencil\xulrunner\xulrunner.exe" --app ..\app\application.ini

This will let you run Pencil normally, without UAC.

Source: http://code.google.com/p/evoluspencil/issues/detail?id=275

Steven Noto
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Take from an answer to a similar question:

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

For more information on how to use the Application Compatibility Toolkit ...(snip)... general instructions.

Community
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DMA57361
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