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I have been working under a domain admin account for years and years. Now, after a windows 10 upgrade, I want to work under a domain user account. More, I would like to retain all the desktop configuration and customizations that I have on the domain admin account.

I know I can enable UAC on the domain admin account and set its setting to low, which will allow me to use Edge and the Win 8 like apps. However, for specific development reasons, I do not want to do that. I use scripts right now to enable/disable UAC on the domain admin account and then reboot each time.

Can the account be "cloned" (on something close to cloning) have it reborn as a domain user? I suspect this is non-trivial because taking ownership leaves fingerprints doesn't it. I also suspect this is non-trivial because I can't see how Windows would allow it, at least in principle.

I hope you will see this as an interesting question in its own right regardless of proper or improper practice.

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  • Why not create a new domain admin account and remove your current account from domain admin group?
    – Ganesh R.
    Aug 3, 2015 at 7:36
  • You will have to migrate the data yourself. You can clone the user, if you take ownership of the previous user profile folder, and paste the contents in the new user's profile directory.
    – Ramhound
    Aug 3, 2015 at 12:16
  • Thank-you! One option to cloning is renaming the domain admin account across all hosts but that breaks many services which need to be repaired. Cloning remains a thorny and dissuasive issue. I did get the Win 10 apps to work from the domain admin account. Briefly, I enabled UAC, rebooted, and set UAC at the lowest setting Then the missing piece - hxxp://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2015/07/windows-10-edge-opened-builtin-administrator-account/. I did the secpol setting and the last regedit suggestion. Win 10 apps work.
    – winterSKY
    Aug 12, 2015 at 0:51
  • Possible duplicate of Moving Windows 7 profile to new user
    – Ben N
    Dec 9, 2015 at 17:12

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