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I’m using Windows 7 Home Premium x64, and it has recently changed to showing this warning on the Run box:

Task will be created with administrative privileges.

I’ve checked UAC, and it is still 100% default, yet I get this thing that others have insisted is because UAC is off. How do I correct this?

BTW, it also shows:

Run in separate memory space.

With that greyed out and checkmarked, but that’s good, IMO. Does anyone know what’s going on?

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  • I've noticed the same thing. I think it is just related to a "convenience" change. Certain tasks will only run with administrator privileges (by definition), because they can change the system. It used to be that you had to manually elevate those. Since you have the privileges to elevate it, that step just served as an inconvenient safeguard to make sure users are paying attention to what they're doing. Now, some of the common tasks that ordinary users routinely run appear to be automatically elevated and that message serves as the alert that the system could be affected.
    – fixer1234
    Jan 31, 2015 at 21:48

2 Answers 2

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The message you're seeing appears when explorer.exe, (which manages the task bar and start menu etc), is running elevated.

If you are sure UAC is enabled, and you are logged on as a user subject to Admin Approval Mode (which should be the case if UAC is at default settings), then you need to find out how/why explorer.exe is running with admin rights.

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  • That used to be the case, but I've noticed on my own system, also, that starting recently (probably as the result of a Windows update), Windows is just going ahead and auto-elevating some tasks, and posting an alert rather than requiring the user to manually run an elevated command.
    – fixer1234
    Jan 31, 2015 at 23:40
  • @fixer1234 Ouch, if you're right about this, then that's a significant behavioural change... I might do some testing in a VM as I'd like to be sure, I'll report back here if I find something :-)
    – misha256
    Jan 31, 2015 at 23:44
  • Thanks for this; looks like something to do with a catastrophic BSOD (one that corrupted a few running applications' profiles, among other damages) is causing explorer to be elevated for me (as confirmed by Task Manager's "elevated" column on the details view) on startup for subsequent restarts. Now I just have to figure out why and hope this is the worst of the damage besides the user profiles that I already fixed/replaced. Any suggestions on where to start in this instance? What, specifically, might be causing Windows to elevate it on start up? You didn't provide any examples, so... Dec 8, 2019 at 6:00
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I stumbled upon a Youtube video that describes how to make Run show that, so I applied it in reverse after cleaning up a non-technical friend's PUPs*:

Start secpol.msc from that Run dialogue.

Local Policies
    Security Options
        User Account Control: Use Admin Approval Mode for the built-in Administrator account

If that setting is disabled, your UAC setting counts for nothing it seems. Enable that and you're back to normal.

*Potentially Unwanted Programs - she had no virus fortunately, but I have no idea how her Windows 7 got running in "Windows 95 mode" (i.e. everything as "root")

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