We are using Windows 7 Enterprise, and in the last week suddenly several people who have local admininstrator rights on their machine are getting an error explorer.exe the handle is invalid error When ever they click on anything which requires admin rights. for example right click on my computer and click manage . it also prevents them from installing software or adding a printer. This problem affects all admin users. I have Local PC admin rights through and AD group added to all machines. And If I log in to an affected machine I have the same problem even If I have never logged in to the machine before. The Local administrator account is not affected however We have been deploying Win 7 for over 6 months now & this problem has only started occurring in the last week.

Hi, Thanks for the post! What’s the special thing you did? Installing some programs? Or some group policies? I recommend you do a clean boot to find out which could result this issue. Meanwhile, turn off the firewall temporally to check if the issue persists. Regards, Miya This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. | Please remember to click "Mark as Answer" on the post that helps you, and to click "Unmark as Answer" if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Hi Miya, Thanks for your info After more investigation today it appears that something has 'broken' UAC because we found that if we turn UAC off by setting the slider to do not prompt and reboot then the file handle error does not occur and The machine we are working on has just been reimaged and joined to the domain and at the beginning it works correctly with the UAC on the default settings and we add Mcafee Enterprise AV HIPS and EPO along with a couple of standard corporate compliance applications. Then at some relatively short period after it goes bad on affected machines, and the error occurs if you do a right click 'Manage' or any admin action that doesn't give you the option to right click and run as Administrator .

Hi, I unmarked this as answered because it wasn't . However further investigation has shown that there is some conflict between the Windows 7 Survey client from scalable software and UAC as previously mentioned if you turn off UAC or remove the Survey client the problem goes away

Hi PortSoft/Miya, Did you find the solution for this issue? Regards,