Disabling UAC programmatically

Question

Is it possible to programmatically disable UAC in Vista? Or, can I make my application run unrestricted by the UAC setting in any way? FYI, the application needs to mount ha

Answer 1

Set the EnableLUA DWORD value in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System to 0 and reboot.

this will disable UAC without a problem, i would do it to all your users, with or without permission is up to you, because the vista UAC is so horrid that i do believe the less people that have it on the better (in vista only) it is now better in win7.

have fun with my registry trick :)

works in win7 as well, let me know how you got along with it.

Answer 2

That would defeat the object of UAC. So no, you can't.

Answer 3

Disabling UAC programmatically would defeat its purpose as this would then also be possible to be done by malware, worms, trojans and virusses and have no real security-effect at all.

You could require to run your application under the admin-account or (I think) let Microsoft somehow sign your application.

There may be other ways I'm not aware of, but none of them is programmatically!

Answer 4

You can't programmatically disable UAC, but you can force the program to run with elevated privileges from the start, so it doesn't prompt each time.

That will cause it to prompt once on startup, but not each time it needs access.

To do this, you'll need to create a manifest file and set <requestedExecutionLevel level="requireAdministrator">

See MSDN for details.

Answer 5

I posted a somewhat granular (but ugly) solution here

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5344021/bypass-uac-in-vbscript/34445992#34445992

It only works if you can kick off the application from the task scheduler. I have it running on two Windows 7 laptops. It is an administrative solution. You need administrator privilege to implement it. I use it for powershell and for my UPS power backup application. I suspect I'll find other uses.

Answer 6

I created a small application to do this, but basically there are 4 registry keys you need to set.

C# example:

Microsoft.Win32.Registry.SetValue("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Policies\\System","EnableLUA", 0);

Microsoft.Win32.Registry.SetValue("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Policies\\System", "ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin", 0);

Microsoft.Win32.Registry.SetValue("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Policies\\System", "PromptOnSecureDesktop", 0);

Microsoft.Win32.Registry.SetValue("HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Action Center\\Checks\\{C8E6F269-B90A-4053-A3BE-499AFCEC98C4}.check.0", "CheckSetting", StringToByteArray("23004100430042006C006F00620000000000000000000000010000000000000000000000"), RegistryValueKind.Binary);

My application runs as a service every 5 minutes to "fight" Group Policy on this, which is an absolute annoyance for a developer machine.

https://github.com/zleight1/DisableUAC