How to assign permissions to manage windows service when UAC is enabled?

Question

I have following scenario:

• I'm local admin on my computer with Windows 7 Enterprise and UAC enabled
• Computer is not in domain and is not under group policy
• I run some program without running it as administrator
• This program sometimes needs to control locally installed windows service (with Manual start options)
• Without running initial program as administrator or without disabling UAC controlling windows service fails.

How can I grant permissions to my account to control this particular service without running with elevated privileges or disabling UAC?

Answer 1

Services, just like about every Windows object, have an ACL associated with it, which can be modified to give you access.

As far as I know, there is no official UI for managing service ACLs, so you're left with two options:

1. Download Process Explorer, start your service (ProcExp only shows running services), double-click on the associated process in ProcExp, click the "Services" tab, and manage permissions from there.

2. sc showsd, learn the ACE syntax and access rights, edit the security descriptor, pass it back to sc setsd.

Answer 2

See also this answer about a question that was made in regard to the Print Spooler service.