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I have Sysinternals Process Explorer installed as the system's task manager (Win7 64). Since half of the metrics for anything started as service and processes started under other user accounts are either silently missing or shown wrong, I would like to run Process Explorer as administrator by default.
Selecting the appropriate item from the menu after failing to perform an action on a process or wondering why some metric is not at all plausible (e.g. no I/O happening when the disk is very obviously reading/writing gigabytes of data, such as during a system backup operation) certainly does "work", but is a recurring, major inconvenience.
The Run as Administrator checkbox in file properties works for tools that you launch by clicking on an icon or a launcher (such as e.g. Autoruns) although it triggers UAC in a sheer stupefying manner every time.
I understand this is a "Feature" of the super smart Windows security system that cannot be avoided other than by turning off UAC completely, which frankly is the second most stupid design decision I've seen in my life.
The bigger problem I'm facing, however, is that enabling said checkbox for Process Explorer will disable the task manager. Ctrl-shift-ESC shows a busy cursor for a fraction of a second and doesn't seem to do anything else. Selecting "Task Manager" from the context menu on the task bar shows an alert stating that higher privilegues are needed to complete this operation (duh, that's exactly what the user is asking for!). The secure attention sequence brings up the lock screen. Clicking on "Task Manager" there does nothing.
Unchecking the checkbox makes Process Explorer work seamlessly again, but it (unsurprisingly) runs as normal user.
Apparently, the Windows guys are concerned that some malware that has already completely subverted the system to a point where it can bypass the secure attention sequence might be able to launch a program as administrator. Good grief.
Is there a workaround to both have Process Explorer come up when hitting Ctrl-shift-ESC (or the attention sequence) and running as administrator?
Which, according to you, is the stupidest design decision you've ever seen in your life? – rahuldottech – 2016-03-16T10:59:24.640
Preferrably, if a program needs some privileges (like most programs elevating do), say, for opening a network connection, or for going beyond its working set cap, or whatever it may be, you should know what the program intends to do (approximately, within a class of operations) and be able to allow or deny this behavior (and be able to make your decision permanent) without also allowing the program to change your browser settings, overwrite files in the system directory, or format the harddisk. Instead, you allow "changes to your computer" which is usually exactly what you don't want. – Damon – 2016-03-16T11:14:51.103