Run program as administrator without an admin user

Question

I have a very-bad-developed software that needs admin privileges to run. This because changes some global files under "c:\program files\app directory". I can grant all users to write into this directory but I don't want to let them install other software and change windows options and so on.

Is is possibile to mislead this app to let its belive that it is running as admin?

Answer 1

You can use RunAsSpc application. It can do what you want.

Get it from here: http://www.robotronic.de/runasspcEn.html

Answer 2

There is always an administrator account on Windows 7 hidden/ disabled by default.

Just run your program by right-clicking the executable file and chose "run as administrator".

This should solve your problem.

Answer 3

The Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) can fix this. No matter what you do, you will need to grant ordinary users read/write access to C:\Program Files\App Directory, but this program is improperly prompting for elevation when it doesn't need to.

This link provides a very good write-up on how to do this. In short:

1. Download the ACT from Microsoft
2. Using the Compatibility Administrator, create a new application fix, point it to the path of the .exe, and choose the RunAsInvoker compatibility flag. Then save the file out to a security database (.sdb) file.
3. Using the sdbinst command, install the .sdb file. This will whitelist the application and prevent a UAC prompt from appearing.

Note that if the application does any admin-like actions other than writing to C:\Program Files (like modifying reg keys under HKLM for example), you will need to give unprivileged users read/write access to those as well.