Hello all, One of the first items I did when I install Vista yesterday was to re-enable the Administrator account and gave it a strong password then changed the account created during the Vista installation to a standard "User" type. In addition, I turned off the UAC control when setting up the Administrator account. Now, I will run as my User account most of the time unless I need to perform some Administrative task which isn't too often. The problem I have is when I went to install Visual Studio 2005 I would right click on the vs\setup.exe which would spawn multiple setup.exe instances until Vista would prompt me that it has ran out of memory and I should close some programs. In addition, when I went to install Office 2007 I right clicked on the setup.exe then select "run as Adminstrator" then it would start to execute then eventually tell me "You must have administrative privileges to install or uninstall this product". In either case Vista never prompted me for the Administrative password. Why is this the case? I would expect Vista to prompt me for the Administrative password which it never did. Is this the expected behavior that I should expect in Vista?Mark

You won't get elevation prompts if you turn UAC off, tasks that require Administrative access will just fail under a Standard User Account.

Andy, With UAC turned off does that mean that "run as" selection is only truly for the Administrator account? Why doesn't Vista prompt for the username/password as in previous Windows? I would assume this is by design.Mark

I believe that "Run As" and "Run as Administrator" work in rather different ways. I'd assume that the secondary logon functionality (i.e. Run As) was largely deemed unnecessary due to the introduction of UAC, which provides a much more secure method of achieving similar results.

True and you should turn on UAC and if you wnat turn off uac warnings

Hello, Okay, from my current understanding the UAC needs to be enabled for the "run as administrator" to function correctly. What would would be the result if I had removed the "Administrator" account and created a admin account using a different username, would the "run as Administrator" still work if UAC was enabled? I did find a work around, though I don't particularly care for the solution. From the command prompt execute the "runas" command using the Administrator as the user which would execute another cmd.exe window then from this cmd window launch the setup program. This round about way works. I can't say I particularlly care for the way Vista implements this functionality. Mark

"Run as Administrator" is a somewhat mis-named command. It actually means "Run as an Elevated Process", it isn't necessary to have the builtin Administrator account enabled (best practice is to leave it off) since any member of the Administrators group can respond to a UAC elevation prompt.

Andy, Okay, I understand the command a little more clearily. One final question, is there a way to bring back the "run as" command to the right-click context menu? In this case, if I disabled/removed the Administrator account though had another account which belong to the Admin group I would be able to type in the username/password.Mark

I don't know of any way to get the old RunAs behaviour, but you should be fine it you just re-enable UAC. It doesn't matter if you use the builtin Administrator account or just another that is a member of the Administrators group, they are equivalent.

It does make a difference if you are trying to access resources remotely on a domain the local inherent admin account is no use at all. DBA