In my defence, I only spelt power that way as I'd run out of characters for the title. Anyhoo....

I have an application (Fruity Loops FWIW) that requires admin access to run on Windows 10. I want miniWishy to be able to use it with his standard user account. I don't want him to have admin access or know the admin password and I don't want to disable UAC completely. Is there any simple way to do this?

I've seen (but not tried) this method but it's for Vista and uses a no longer supported tool. There reference to the Windows 10 ADK in the previous link but I don't know if this would do the same thing as the Vista workaround.

I'm more than willing to try it (it being the method in the previous paragraph) but would like to know if anyone who really knows what they're doing (as oppose to just randomly trying things that pop up on Google until they work like me!) has any better ideas before I do.

"(Win 10): Forum Power" would have cured your character count issue...

Why does this program require admin access? I'd be very very suspicious of any program for general use, particularly for junior, that needs it.

There's no specific reason for this (it's music production software) to need admin access other than lazy programming. According to my Googling this seems to be the reason for this general issue given on t'internet. It appears to be a legacy issue with software that's been ported from older versions of Windows (Fruity Loops has certainly been around long enough for this to affect it) but never been fully updated to take account of the UAC that appeared with later versions of Windows.

My options so far appear to

1. Disable UAC - For obvious reasons I'm not going to do this.
2. Give miniWishy admin access - Erm.... nope.
3. Find a way round it for this one piece of software, hence this post.

I've done this a few times at work for the odd piece of software (none of my users have local admin rights to their machines) where the developers got lazy and simply specified "must be local admin".

You can use Process Monitor to identify the areas of the system that Fruity Loops is failing to access as a standard user, then delegate access to those areas to miniWishy's account. Job done.

Excellent thanks, I'll have a look at that.

I've had a play with that tool and the issue seems to be that I'm not sure what I'm looking at.

I've set it to capture, opened Fruity Loops and I can see that it accesses 3 files as me (I have the same non admin access rights as miniWishy) which are FL.exe (itself) and two instances of ntdll.dll, (one in system32 and one in sysWOW64). The users group has read & execute access to all of them. Changing the FL.exe makes no difference and I'm loathed to change access on the dlls as it would require changing ownership (currently trustedInstaller) of system dlls.

I can also see the log for what happens once I've input the admin password but that list is huge, even if I just open it and close it straight away so it's hard to tell what to look for. This what I see until the admin access is granted if that helps shed light on it.

Essentially you're looking for ACCESS DENIED entries under Result.

You'll probably find it easier to disable UAC notifications first, then run the program as a standard user - watch for ACCESS DENIED, then just use your admin user account to assign appropriate permissions to the specified folders/files/registry keys.

A slightly dirty way of doing it (that I'd never do in a corporate environment, but probably OK for home...) is to setup a "One Time" scheduled task to run FL Studio as your admin user, saving the credentials for that user in the task. Then you can just create a shortcut on miniWishys desktop to that task - it'll run using your stored credentials.

Of course, that would help. Seems rather obvious now, I wasn't getting any access denied messages as I was having to go through UAC to load it and giving the admin credentials in the process.

Haha, yes, that would do it

Of course, for a program like FL, it could be a seemingly endless stream of ACCESS DENIED messages and the scheduled task could be a lot simpler.

Well it's been an interested journey into new waters for me but I seem to going round in circles for the first method.

I only seem to be able disable UAC via the control panel if I'm logged in as admin and this change doesn't affect standard users. If I try to do this from a standard account the OK button is greyed out. I've even done this from a shortcut with elevated privileges and it still doesn't work.

I can fully disable UAC via the registry and Fruity Loops loads fine as a standard user but in this case Process Monitor refuses to run (without being on admin account) so I can't get the output I need.

If I reverse the UAC registry change then process monitor works again but as I have UAC on for standard users I'm a few posts back up the thread again.....

I'll try the scheduled task trick next but I've been avoiding the day job for the last hour so maybe later.

Gleaned from SuperUser.com, might be worth a bash:



To disable UAC prompts for one application only you have to use the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7352

You have to run, as administrator, the correct "Compatibility Administrator" program. There are two of them, one for 32bit applications and one for 64bit applications.

On the left hand tree menu, on the bottom is "Custom Databases", and under it "New Database(1) [Untitled_1]"
Right click on the "New Database(1) [Untitled_1]"; select Create New, and Application Fix.
Enter the name and other details for the application you want to alter behavior on and then browse to it and select it.
Click Next until you are in the Compatibility Fixes screen.
On the Compatibility Fixes screen, find the item RunAsInvoker, and check it.
Click Next and then Finish.
Select File and Save As.
Save the file as [filename].SDB in a directory you can type easily on the command line.
Open a Command Prompt as administrator.

Run the command: sdbinst [drive]:\[path]\[filename].sdb & pause (For example I was fixing the UAC for Clover and the command I typed was:

sdbinst "C:\Program Files (x86)\Clover\Clover.SDB" & pause

You should get a new window that says:

Installation of [name] complete.

Press any key to continue . . .

And that worked for me... Good Luck! - Sy

Cheers something else to try later.

Reading through my last post again particularly this bit

leads me to think that it's only the request for UAC that's stopping it running. In other words it (FL) doesn't actually need to access any admin restricted resources at all as it runs fine without UAC.

One way to adjust settings that are inaccessible for a regular user is to temporarily give that account admin rights. Login as that user to make any necessary changes and then remove the additional administrator rights.

A method for doing this:
1) Login with your current administrator account.
2) Click on start menu, All Apps and scroll down to the bottom where you will find 'Windows System'. Expand to reveal "Command Prompt". Right click, select "More" and then finally "Run as Administrator".
3) Enter the command lusrmgr
4) In the new window, click on users to reveal all user accounts.
5) Right click on the appropriate regular user account and select properties to launch a dialog box.
6) Select the 'Member Of' tab. Most likely the account will be listed as a member of 'Users'. Click 'Add' and add 'Administrators' to the list.
7) Hit Apply / OK etc & log off.
8) Log back in under the account for which you wish to make changes and work your magic. Log back off again.
9) Repeat steps 1-7 but this time remove the extra Administrator rights.

It was indeed worth a bash, we have winner! Thank-you.

For my own future reference I used the Windows 10 ADK instead as the linked one is no longer supported (the application compatibility toolkit comes up as a tick box when installing the ADK). I've tried it with the 64bit version of Fruity Loops and it works fine. I'll try the 32 bit version later, as usual I'm supposed to be working but this sort of problem is much more interesting!

Barney,
Thanks for your suggestion too, that may well have got round the problems I was having with UAC in the previous method.

Excellent, glad you got it sorted

Second that.

All done. Did both versions and miniWishy's laptop last night. Piece of cake to fix using this method. I may well use it more as I'm currently going through what software I have that works and what doesn't on my recently upgraded Win10 desktop. Once I've decided what's staying and what's going then I'm going to flatten it completely and do a fresh reinstall.

Many thanks again for the suggestions.