On Windows 10 global hotkeys of nonelevated apps do not work from elevated apps

Question

I run some apps on startup like Greenshot, Winamp, that have registered global hotkeys.

But these hotkeys do not work in apps that I run with Administrator privileges, so to use hotkeys I first need to switch to another noneleveted app and this is pretty annoying.

When running same Winamp as Administrator, it's hotkeys work fine in both non- and eleveted apps.

On Windows 7 I had not any problems with this. Searching Google had not give me any clues on how to fix this.

Answer 1

That's by design in Windows' User Account Control: it would be a potential security issue if any application were able to spy on key presses in applications with elevated permissions.

If you trust a specific program using a hotkey, you can configure it to always run with administrator privileges. As you're mentioning Greenshot specifically, that's one of the workarounds we suggest for this behavior.

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Disclosure: I am member of the Greenshot team.